A.D. Concrete

Yes, there were fallen blossoms by the kerb, but when walked through they became whipping little twisters of unheard, disqualified words; a whirlwind of petals. A presence in the empty attic bedroom reasons that it is no longer empty. This presence riots at the opera, it demonises the private to an audience of deaf-mute swans who listen with their eyes. In the street below manx cats prowl for restaurant rats while a lone young man cuts at the overgrown tendrils strangling his window. The loft has become pregnant with triplets of ideas.

Asbo Music

Disapology

Decahedron stage and high walled theatre
the Victorian chambers of public post mortems
that house the poet’s nascent contortions and not
once in two hours do I take my eyes from his,
and hers.

Luminous the sandflies streaming through the frosted window,
luminous the moonlight filing smooth the brushwood porch,
luminous the plastic turned upon an aged lathe
at the order of a carnival-macabre.

“The swans and their mistress,
the swans and their mistress,
the swans
and their mistress
will fall.”

“Alcospas”, I shout, the swamp’d Thames coiled
round vox bloodied strips of eurodisco and candle-
lit beefpunks and burgerlungs all dryhumping in a
damp Westgate cellar. Bottles in diamonds and
crowns - that one with its paper like a butcher’s cut
sealed with wax, that one a token of the past, she
whispers, that one good for the breaking -
and a display case of cigars on serene rotation.

I wear hotpants and a head-dress made of feathers
and howl at the glitterball for hours:

“The swans and their mistress,
the swans and their mistress,
the swans
and their mistress
will fall.”

Calender

With you, I cast my net
over id’s silver ideas
that shoal beneath cell
walls like the stickles we
caught in summer lost,
and let go of. Pendulum
exposure is a postcard
from the road and I faint
and I laugh at our fate.
Concentrate velocity
diluted with spring water
has the autumn come too
soon and gone again. With
you I revere winter green
and celebrate in song the
lines that bind us all together
till the time when time is
done.

No Look Portraits

Monolord

Every day the barristers come with faces sharp from leathered text and empty chequebooks, red from wine and the quayside air and underscored by bone structures designed to tear flesh and leaf. We share astronomical formulae in the contractions of the iris, we share the accounted aromas of the restaurant, we share a space.
I watch the single mind of the far clouds whilst absently polishing glasses and think about the conditions of my friends in turn. You who have had it tough, you in your tennis shoes and your velvet jacket, you with your porcine face and dramatic personas, you who said nice things to me, you with whom I watched the waters draw in at dusk, you the migrational, the pendulum, the fulcrum, the counterbalance, the dead and the unborn, you for whom I would do anything but can do nothing, you ignorant of the unsaid scope of affection, you for whom I came to make espressos after dark and could stay with until dawn.
I consider a photograph that could only be justified by the inclusion of a human element, a photograph of the humpbacked bridge descending upon functional steeples and fading to the empty tarmac car park where no children play. I become so engaged with the natural elements and the desire for a composition as to mistake a curl of air from the extraction fan to be a hand on my arm - your hand in fact.
Walking home I talk amiably to a drunk man ejected from a concert for cheering too loudly. When we part on divergent street corners I tell him that Kant was a midget who never left his hometown. He walks off shouting ‘Kant! Kant!’, his voice echoing on the considered walls of Northumberland Street and fading into the relentless spool loops of traffic lights, taxis and the subterranean metro somewhere not so far beneath our feet.

3 Pastel Colours

Mantras of coincidence forebode a pagan collapse. Pavlov triggers a face on passing bus billboards as elegies rise from exhaust. Even the ripples in the stately winding river dispense a course of action or Xanax. Meanwhile, I deny the fissure between intent and product. The product shapes intent just as technique governs ambition. I abseil into uncontrol with a song in my head.

Riposte

light-hearted infusions of sarcasm in hot water douglas coupland as a soft french cheese a postmodern literary analogy perhaps there were many as were there women artists too many of which spells trouble better off making lists on paper folds in paper paper in coconut milk paper scissors stone the crows have you read it only the guardian which remains in the footwell to be recycled and reread as a right-wing editorial in a surrey hamlet where basslines reverberate in the skirting boards nu munki perhaps you are a new monkey not a levellers fan though to your credit genres are dismissed and dissected with sandwiches and family trees coastal erosion examined igneous or sedimentary religious or phallic puffins unnoticed or seen only in pub toilets by french horn enthusiasts involved in rigged musical disputes where rigging would be better used in unrealistic plans of seafaring and modern day piracy arts coucil funded of course as are curious brass figures south of the river as should be john's curios funded only by an obsessive and wandering enthusiasm which at least encourages conversation and sometimes wind which may be closer to networking than i am to being arts council funded for brisk coastal walks to solitary italian restaurants operated by tyneside mafia under the guise of elaborate napkins and antipasto whilst the middle classes discuss poetry and the moral problem with buying north sea cod from local fishermen even if they are in fact artists fishing for relevance with giant pencils prodding the community with a self-conscious lead beating children over the head with apple macs bought off the back of a classic hatchback and left behind in the name of a jolly good day out.please can i have my house keys back it is bitter out xxx

Thames Valley School of Driving

north shields quayside fish docks, hannah and taryn's art intervention project in empty white walled gallery space, banging on the doors of abandoned lighthouses, along the sea wall to it's point and back again, up steep stairs past boycott netto posters and into a furniture and curio shop full of lost seventies photo albums, kodak colorsplash cameras from the sixties, bags of rusted hammers and pliers, a man who joyously broke wind at great length and noise, a strange hairy rabbi doll in it's original packaging that played a broken melody when shaken, cheap detuned beautiful old upright pianos with free delivery, then departure to south shields through gateshead's relentless traffic.

divided a sandwich in half in the car and ate while polly put her jacket across her lap, looked out the window at the motorway interchanges and engineering and asked me about home, laughing. claims my particular brand of apparent recklessness can be attributed to the Thames Valley School of Driving - hand on roof, window down, music cranked, cigaret in hand and handbrake turns. I refute.

south shields beach and then to another sea wall where the waves were leaping up over the railings and I played the game but got soaked and my phone filled with little shrimps and is now broken; staggering back whilst wiping the salt water out my eyes, I stood in 4 inches of water and ruined my shoes; climbed the red iron steps of another abandoned warning tower and mocked the unimaginative graffiti there, carnival on to marsden grotto and pints of guinness by the squally dashed north sea, admiring the limestone erosion patterns like geography teachers on holiday.

to the byker wall for hannah's delicious fresh veg curry and origami crocodile competition then on to the cumberland where tom and fabienne slaved and al talked cheerfully with his silly booming laugh to some nice looking people, on to the free trade to see a woman like lolo ferrari with an arbitrary line drawn around her jaw to demark the alleged zone of her lips, ugly tits spilling out of an ugly top, talk of funding from arts developement council and angry arguments with insistent feminists then home, home to my house to sleep.

Camera Obscura

At 3 ante, brut glugged obscene
into stolen arcoroc - an insipid
grubby popera for the audience
at Dawn. Half step to youthful
moon, his white hair stainless
iridium and coy, dress ripped by
the silent blue light of passing
suburban police. Fulcrum on the
Milton rails like blizzard outside
home, that sweetnd cup of
warmed up milk for rook buildings
on country roads. Testament and
legacy a hot-tub full of painted
stockings and kissed photo
graphs. Tomorrow is a brawl with
a fair skinned girl beaten up against
stadium walls, as deep fat
prayers fire up a’bubblin viscous
unthought process like broken traffic
or communal dependence, a promise
of rain and slate clean skies and
as ever the music in my mind
that no one else should hear.
Fulcrum on the Solzhen line of
ritalin and sugar puffs, I turn off
the alarm clock and fall into bed
to dream or maybe not.

A Bird Loves The Sun On Her Back

Ext. Day: Whitley Bay in late afternoon

I
In scarlet electric storm fields that lead to the coast
where waves crash an ice tide of crack’d pearls,
iridescent driftwood and convulsive silver fish,
she sings to me a warning song.

II
Scything auld thermals above resort in decay
and the traffic of our talkshow youth below,
we hunt the ocean of perpetual summer in yesterday’s
chip-wrapped headlines snagged on the broken glass
of abandoned arcades.

III
Doric cliff columns absorb the red ink dusk
and will do so until the day does not come,
for Time is no mere chronological concept
of knots in a strand that must be undone.

IV
Far out in the swells where light falls in bands
and dusk is depicting a few early stars,
she flies in defiance of thundrous cars
curling the serpentine road.

V
Polarised by latitude, we regurgitate in gutters
the rhetoric of a doctrine sold in triplicat and hope,
while the view of Norway is gradually obscured
by the tacked up chipboard windows.

VI
And as I turn and leave this town along a promenade
and through a labyrinth underground,
I hear her song as a hymn to tomorrow
where our children fight ever on.

Transposed With Dictionaries From The Old English

Vär skap kohl floes
kraked Sîan bohr
Spectre ah köhve
truqil ø pashk
in urban woodland.

Ciklan pär
ø Lucufus rokk
unbroke morn
sihillati
ø dejets.

Ry nils Spectre
behrehn ø schäde vilo
tranz kahbĕ Solus
church bells
enviktu ti antti.

And in the pines
ti axen kahsp
ø Lucufus raggan ah rahw
bljed halle mund
in the pines.

“Bahn espri,
phoe ex ash
North Kar,
negla eglise,
kraked constella!

Bahn schäde fernus!"

apok Solus
arose alight,
and still.

They will come at dawn
vär skap kohl Sîan
bledden kopse
ø Spectre tranz
cyrran Lucufus
sheher kyss
blue on lips
ciklan frey
with courage.

See You When I See You

“If an ox could draw his god
he'd draw an ox if an ox
could draw his god…”

- Xenophanes

I

Feral children climb carcass bones on the back
lawn of a red brick, semi detached house
and drink around circular tables of iron wrought
into the chaotic equations of an ivory vine. A murder
of crows sits in the pine tree Palace
kahwing through the velux, open and cold,
in a burst vacuum can.

II

His legs slick with sweat, hers with the glaze of the sun.

III

Яapists come in all shapes and sizes
and there is abuse in geology.
State funded school children
as legal age camouflaged
TVs on T.V.
y’kna, daisy chains
of the obscene
absence of love.

IV

Great love is a holy fear/:
the contrapuntal cello in Dumbarton oaks,
a symphony of fallen leaves –
heavy, leather
forecasts of autumn.

Or for ten points
the rising choir, female and modular,
accessing that tropos condition of innocence:
the fighter pilot’s inferno,
the cirrus Eden of a wilful melody,
the blender full of eyeballs?

V

Feral children climb the steeple’s velvet apex above
gravestones pocked by cedillas \ umlauts
to watch the solemn mourning carnival
of stoats and shrews devour their young
to the insistent pulse of old candle moon.
Bengalsky’s men surround the Theatre
awaiting the fallen dancer –
the strangled swan.

VI

A latex woman in our cold bed.

VII

Seventy Kopek steam rushes out my kitchen window
filling Bronnaya with cabbage and tangerine.
On the pavement, young proley florist re-arranges
long stem roses in a red mop bucket, occasionally
touching his breast pocket
and a postcard from The Yalta.
Feral children yell a Prok requiem.

VIII

Great love is nil cacosonis and
the forming of songs of tranquil indolence/:
consonants repeated in the gymnopaedie,
upon the high beam and all over the floors.

IX

I fly tonight.

Spatial Ship

((p is true) v (false is q)
under the brown wood table))

The philosophy of problems tells of an end,
a flag on a minor moon.

Triplets For Clifford Duffy

no middle initial to hide India in a box fort
or grapple the pockmarked back
skin of time.

no bottle of Uzo at the end of the rope,
nightmares of the Loch Ness Monster or
daydreams of id.

no carousellesque of sugared almond stalls
or acute prostitutes seducing the obscure
at the gates to Lunar Park.

no notes on bark with charcoal
upon a desert island formed of ideas, of lava,
and of the pearly shells of hermit crabs.

no quilt,
sunday,
or discarded jumper brushed with perfume.

no cheques cashed till payday,
payday,
or the franchise of poetry.

no mother;
tombstone vase birdbath cherrytree
or regret.

no being held
cradled
and hushed.

no
no.
only now.

Expo I

TGI Heaven

At a buffet cooked in Hell's kitchen
(with napkins starched in purgatory)
I sit at a table for one admiring
views of Lake Vanda and it's 2 million year drought
surfed by blue and gold pleasureboats
beneath a crescent of desert mountains
brewing up electrical storms and
some 22nd century composer whose name I don't know
is playing a strange haunting song on the one key piano.

I eat cracked crab on a pak choi and spinach bed
and drink three barrels brandy from the bottle.
I light cigarets and place them untouched in the ashtray
to smoulder like an aggravating incense.
I suppose I am lonely and that life and soul
departed from my lips in a foxes wedding
years ago, ho ho, I suppose.

And round the circular table adjacent to mine
a whoop of baboons talk stocks and share
several bottles of non vintage German wine
as I mutter into the tape recorder:

'8.05 pm still waiting to go out sailing
on a blue and gold pleasureboat
under the studied danger of electrical storms.'

Then when talking to myself I remember a joke you made
about your body
and I repeat it without
realising how weird I must look
to all the other customers here,
and it makes me smile,
and its only when I smile that I realise how abnormal it is
to be in touch with an unseen friend,
rather like writing to heaven
and getting answered by god's secretary,
who's probably just some low ranking
angel anyway.

Class Streaming

In my day, which is now and tomorrow, a child's education of literature involves the identification, dismantling and analysis of components in order to manufacture a reasoned critical standpoint.

Presented with any written work, be it prose, play or poem, identification of subject matter, theme, tone and perspective follows. This is to break down the overt, to interpret that which can be translated.

In dismantling, the child is asked to deconstruct passages into emotive and didactic cores in order to attribute them with personal meaning, or resonance.

In the final critical analysis, the child is expected to opine and extrapolate theories as to the success of the piece, and wherever possible to identify faults by making use of refined examples.

So here’s a kid who hands in a critique on unlined paper written in green biro and filled with patois, sarcasm, vitriol and curses. The paper itself is crumpled and the ink has been smudged. She receives the lowest possible mark. She is punished because she has not attempted to represent her feelings within the guidelines of the teacher, the exam board or the government.

“She’ll never learn,” they will say of her in their rooms.

And they are, of course, correct. Because they will not encourage indiscipline, which they fear will become independent discipline.

“They’ll not teach me,” the girl is saying through her actions.

And she is correct too. If she feels that a piece of work is irrelevant to her, then so her response becomes irrelevant.

Everybody’s happy.

Our Contribution To The Insurgency

We were a hundred miles outside of Raxaul and Birgunj on the Indian border with Nepal, headed south for Varanasi. There was no moon.

The bus had dead shocks and it was covered in neon acrylic daubings for spiritual protection. Many of them were faded. The driver was a small man who played trebly bhangra at full volume through blown speakers to remain conscious. He wore a collared beige shirt and slacks pressed with an immaculate crease. Both were stained.

Sparse jungle. From the depths of a footwell (I had offered my slatted bench to a middle aged woman in a turquoise sequinned sari) the weak headlights flashed off coconut palms and sequoia trees draped with vines. Out of the rear window, a dust storm rose in swirling clouds burned a deep red by faulty brake lights that were jammed on.

Books had informed me that tigers lived within these trees, prowling the forest floor for infant monkeys fallen from the nest. They hunted alongside rhinos, hippos, cobras, and spectacular ants with fat bodies who could devour an abandoned baby in minutes. I never saw any of these things.

The bus came to a sudden and obvious halt, as if the driver had been forced to stop for a landslide.

Voices outside. The door prised open. Automated interior lights on to a burst of shouting. Then the bus driver shouting. Passengers awoke and slowly sat up.

A gang poured in, filling the central aisle. There were big and powerfully built farmers, small and twitchy sons, and old, lithe men. Their jet eyes flashed with adrenaline through the gaps in handkerchief balaclavas. One of them shouted at the driver to turn off the bhangra. They carried an assortment of weapons - the old man nearest me held the kind of hooked machete a butcher uses to gut a pig. he smelt of patchouli and hemp oil and I thought of his wife for a second.

He thrust the polished blade at my throat and as I shrunk back against the wall of the bus, I could see the thousands of tiny hammer marks that had beaten his steel. Then I looked him in the eyes. He was shouting something at me.

The woman in the turquoise sari had gathered up her legs and clutched at them like a little girl.

‘Money. They want money,’ she said to me tremulously. I turned my head slightly on this remark and saw that the sequins around her shoulders were shimmering in the yellow cabin light. She was shaking.

The butcher held up the four beautifully twisted fingers of his free hand. I took that to mean a demand of four hundred rupees. He pushed the blade an inch closer to my throat.

I slowly removed the only note in my pocket, which happened to be five hundred rupees, and held it out. He switched the machete to his left hand and took the note sharply from my grasp with his right, withdrew the blade sharply and turned to check on the progress of the gang.

Other travellers were being liberated of banknotes. An Israeli fresh out of national service had been struck across the face and his nose was broken and bleeding badly. He was spitting on the floor. A young, frail looking bandit stood over him with his club raised, shouting indecipherable local dialect at the back of his head. I assumed the Israeli had offered misguided resistance or machismo, since when I had spoken to him upon embarkation he had talked with a guttural enthusiasm of Palestine and his role as a gunner.

The entire ambush took no longer than three minutes. They dissolved into the dangerous jungle, and I saw that one man had his arm around the shoulder of his son.

*

Be aware of how the language of the International News Bureaus subtly shapes our impressions of world events. Thirty years ago they talked of Rebels, twenty years ago it became Freedom Fighters, ten years ago it was Armed Factions, five years ago it was Militants, and now, now, very now we have the Insurgents. Beware of the International News Bureaus - they know what they’re doing.

The New Gonzo

'I cannot help but scene myself, sketch my position into my academic wanderings, give a reader the sense of not simply what I have been reading, but where.'

And how. As an arbitrary triumvirate, Kerouac, Thompson and Wolfe positioned themselves within the constraints of self-induced drug dystopia. They were the central characters operating within the masquerade of their own reportage, telling stories set within a psychadelicatessen full of sliced revelations and coldcut epiphanies.

For the Millenials, it is tempting to dismiss the excesses of the beat and the post-beat writers. To we who are governed by the steel muzzle of commerce and cradled by the feathered down of dollars, pounds, euros and yen, this is the age of the atrocity and the work of the Gonzo godfathers seems inebriated.

Would Hunter, for all his work against impingements on civil liberties, have functioned pro-actively without such a monumental hangover? The temptation is to say that the drugs gave him a cause and made him fight, but I don't believe that. The man himself claimed he would never have survived if all his stories had been true and frequently nodded to Neil Cassady as proof.

Yet it is an invalid exercise to theorise about a quasi-Hunter aware of the Nietzschean superman who chooses intoxicated discretion whilst simultaneously remaining in control of his dominant Id and directing his attentions on a sober attack upon the state. Invalid because it is the wild freedom of mescaline binges inside the state line that attracts us to the writings of the Gonzoid beat boys and their dictatorial impositions of will and choice. We risk standing upon soapbox hypocrisy and echoing Leary’s latter day denouncement of drug use if we call for detoxicated heroes in rehab.

*

To place one’s self at the centre of a story empowers our unique, personal truth. Within this notion are contained the possibilities of humanising tragedy, of quantifying injustice with the humanity of humour, and of abnegating statistical empiricism.

So instead of:

‘2,000 were killed in riots between the Lebanese mafia and Mananga tribesmen in Gambia yesterday’,

We get something akin to:

‘An orange sun defined the idyllic diesel generators and cocktail shacks of Mbama beach, but as I walked, I became aware of several columns of acrid black smoke dispersing in the distance. Then, as I came closer to the suburbs, I realised that sounds previously taken to be the thunderclaps of some encroaching tropical swell were, in fact, large bore automatic weapons posing questions. I didn’t see a dead body until I arrived at the children’s adventure playground that backs onto my hotel’s garden. A police officer was slumped over a swing, his exposed intestines already covered in flies. A large pool of treacle was spreading underneath him, and he seemed to have died with his eyes open, in great pain.’

*

In order to report a story, you have to live the story. In order to read it, you have to use your imagination to make it come alive, and a writer can help with this. Barren statistical writing and bleakly conjugated ideas - no matter how erudite - will ultimately only deliver a message to a tiny minority of gentrified intelligentsia and pathetique sympathisers. It is indolent journalism.
Most subs claim that only type A will do, and that people don’t have time to read type B for the Millennial urbanite is far too busy to empathise with a distant reporter attempting to find super-ego equilibrium through her verbose story telling. This is an economic oligarchy that encourages empirical news reporting and desensitization. It spreads like influenza, unnoticed, through the news-digesting nation, until eventually even the most terrible soundbite loses all impact because it has no founding in steeled personal truth.

‘2,000 were killed in riots between the Lebanese mafia and Mananga tribesmen in Gambia yesterday’.

*

Empathy is a divine word for the godless. It promotes respect, forethought, insight, compassion and, most importantly, imagination.

Foundations

When set as cement in the correct measurements, the ambiguities of the English language can construct glacial insights into any chosen theme - ever shifting yet apparently monolithic. But when carelessly juxtaposed, such cement will not set, remaining a uselessly inert and viscous mixture of yellows and greys.

Much modern poetry utilises a sloppy congress between aesthetics and form in order to create a universe of infinite meaning and meaningless infinity.

Reformulated poetic structure evoking the angst of the writer and justified by killer one-liners and clever sentences will never do. Poetry is Rilke’s naming of the nameless. It is an impressionist artform, but like Cézanne, it requires recognition of laws or else it will forever flounder in the beautiful lagoon of shallow ambiguity.

What’s He Building In There?

Adam Thomas, architect of shadowplay upon barren walls and sometime clean shaven anti-poet, is undertaking a new project discussing his growth into interpretive academia, focusing specifically on post war literary theory.

For Thomas, a central concern has long been the camouflage of actualities in order to saturate reality with a refreshed truth. In previous incarnations the m.o. was to isolate the colourwheel rotations of the day: to distil the experience of becoming a man into a palette of graphite sketches. The resulting stark, spare language and profusion of colliding core concepts lent the old Thomas a lyrical, yet angular aesthetic firmly rooted within the minutiae of a bleached world. Reading him was rather like finding emeralds on the floor of a sterile laboratory - he invoked a sun seen through a double glazed window.

“Speckled carpet, shorn of dust, clean parallels, no sex anymore.”

Such exposure to a quixotic world required a constant configuring and restructuring of reactions. In order to maintain his logical continuum, his growth, Thomas was perhaps occasionally victim of his own emotive subterfuge. When precise geometries are described with such definitive cruelty, it seems almost as if there is no space left for the boy to grow into, as if any deviation from previous revelations will jeopardise the integrity of the original thought.

“I wait for my words to mean nothing, pared down as they are by a lack of context, a discreet humbling which renders my outpourings little more than an exercise in hand-eye co-ordination.”

And so divorcing the ‘years worth of unfocused idiocy’, we find him cut loose upon the lifeboat, scraping sodden matches against their vesta case and hurling scraps of unrequired flesh to the sharks. Alone upon some Northern ocean, he is exerting constraints upon his environment like the man who was god. This unflinching, acetate etching is both an evocative diary of the mundane and a blackboard for the de/construction and debate of modern literature. The voice has matured without losing the laconic and likeable nuances, and his most powerful character is still the city.

Personally, since the subject matter is specified to a degree, it is way over my head. But then I like nice words, so I tend to sit at the screen absorbing as much as I interpret and listening as much as I read.
It is far too early to remark upon much else, so I suggest you take a look for yourself and find out what he’s building in there. You have a right to know.

Red Medicine

Retromance

XVII
Alone, Mary ordered dishes from the chalkboard menu, juggling shrapnel
in her handbag, cafe closed,
her head consumed by bacon and eggs and fried bread,
dictating a drafted will and testament in blank verse upon her empty stomach.

XVI
The city spoke of elocution, her circulation a design fault,
her dancing star restless in the wings,
double tanqueray on ice with tonic and a fine sapphire necklace,
repealed applause a reprise for 'disintegration' (as she defined her condition) - viz. deconstruction in the lips of infants.

XV
As umbrellas downed and pearly drizzle coagulated around the stacks of the power station, All was thinly veiled in the lies of Oktober,
All being infrastructure, war and commerce, All breeding penicillins and moulds, All the religious caresses of commutable partnerships,
All the closed circuit kisses buoyed by the immediacy of seasonal fog.

XIV
3 billion dead; elsewhere, bodies to be deep-frozen and smashed; gin tears; regulation of congestion zone to be monitored; gutless cocaine ingestion no substitute for maternal love; the debt we owe her [r.e.: former prime minister]; England team victorious.

XIII
Laughter filtered through plasterboard floors, a private engagement to the liquid crystal display. Our Mary’s beauty was sarcastic and Saharan, but why must I endlessly commemorate her and her immense resistance to erosion? Nothing, more than sand, nothing.

XII
The darkened cave walls were covered in ancient graffiti of some anthropological interest, the atrium slick with bursting pods of seaweed acting as an indicator of climate’s progress.

XI
Umbrellas up.
It is hard to write about happy things.

X
Denial of use of class A drugs by blushing Labour minister; licence fee mandate referred to local referendums; 7 billion alive; Jordan floods Gaza; vote for the ugliest car of 2005; comedian in tragic fall; England team defeated.

IX
Mary used to live on the coast where the trees are either coniferous or imported tropical palms, shrubs and cacti, and eventually she had no gauge for the passage of time. Once when she visited the hills she was astounded to understand that it was in fact late autumn, and not the youthful summer that the globalised skies and waxy desensitized spines had suggested. We spent that afternoon kicking curled golden leaves and walking interlinked and synchronised, and that evening we made love for the second time.

VIII
Dived naked into the warm, black sea long after the witching hour. Clouds of phosphorescent plankton streamed and swirled around her, each organism as violently coloured as tinsel glitter, All uselessly redistributing the sun’s energy in the only way they understood.

VII
A conductor’s baton rapped the music stand to let an Inter-City 125 past. It crawled along, weighed down by influenza, Austin Reed, and the gentle fans of laptops wirelessly connected to the international information exchange.

VI
Diseases borne by ducks killed 25million in 1918-19; Kate Moss’ internal turbulences account for her compelling attraction; world to end in 2013; congestion zone enlarged; U.N. president survives auto-assassination much to self disgust; England team victorious.

V
Feet up on the backs of the cheaply upholstered cinema chair in front,
Mary observed a looped reel of our first meeting
intercut
with venial and bloody hardcore pornography,
images of sunsets seen from the hospital window, the shaving of pubic hair,
cars reversing down the motorway and backing in to garages,
superstars masturbating and brushing their teeth.
Mary wet.

IV
Mary the manifestation of my un-thought, giving definition to angelic syntax, shutdown.
With hair like coral we parted from each other until dawn, only reunited
by the crescendo roar of stacked valve amplifiers and the drone of near-space. We were not together then.

III
On the balcony of Puccino’s we shared a salad because we were not hungry.
The chalkboard was decorated with vines of ivy
drawn by an amateur hand full of love. On returning from the lavatory
I stood to let her past, then grabbed her about the waist. She giggled.
We danced a waltz a sine wave, frequency doubling and dividing.
No matter.

II
Explicit theatre slammed by critics; sub-continental shift births new hope; atmospheric gas blizzards cause chronic respiratory disease; Bliar;
England 1 - England 1.

I
‘See that line where the paving slabs meet?’
‘Yes?’
‘Let’s say that marks our boundary.’
‘Between?’
‘Friendship/’
‘And more?’
‘Yes.’

(silence)

‘I don’t want to lose you as a friend.’
‘You won’t.’


*


-I
'I'm strong. I work out.'
'I can't bare to hear from you.'
'Remind you of your sins?'
'I hear you've got a serious boyfriend.'
'He's beautiful.'
'Oh, I get it.'
'He's everything you're not.'

(silence)

'I have to support the world.'
'He's just a boy.'

-II
She lies on her front in the bath.
Her head rests upon a crooked elbow,
soapy rivulets dripping off her fingers,
and her hair floats up to Saturn,
where the razor's grazes on her long legs
become sapphires.

-III
Zildjian K thunderclaps roll in from the jungles to prelude the deluge.
Pre-thermal, Arctic swells garrison us within the tower block fort.
Lit tea-lights spill wax, and against those four walls -
the silhouettes of vaporous heat and two bodies.

-IV
This carnival of genetics and circus tents is drenched in organ requiems,
cleansing the tapestry of delusion.
I hold her hand through the crowds, having grown up in the countryside.
She kisses my cheek because she is hallucinating.

-V
We launch the rowing boat into the cold canal with barely a ripple.
It is dark, so the boat is full of woollen blankets and cheap cushions.
Fish leap.

-VI
The city is shrinking within the future like a bottle of water on a ship.
Arches are difficult to fabricate. The tidal efficiency of straight lines
augurs a good economy, a warm spring.

-VII
‘I feel like I’ve lost my spark.’

(she cries)

-VIII
Electro-magnetic anti-gravitational fields
are in development in the six homeless children’s hostels.

-IX
Pine trees in geometric diamonds colonise the hillsides
above the Swiss town, and the lake appears to have burst
it's shoreline. The fission/fusion research centre hums in B minor
as a family unpack their picnic.

-X
She takes a packet of cigarets from her bag,
loosens her tie,
locks the cubicle door,
opens the slit window,
unwraps the cellophane,
removes one,
lights it,
and smiles.
She is ten years old.

-XI
The door to decompression opens.
To express the immediate through latent flow is
enough. Terminal velocity in eleven seconds.

-XII
Photographs of:
vermin on toast, a diseased peach,
spiders in the plughole, flowers in the gutter,
compressed coal, the treason of refining crude thought,
and an entire mountain-range,
yesterday.

-XIII
17
20
11
3
16
The numbering of candles

-XIV
The doctor smiles when she tells Him that she tried to throw herself
in front of a bus, He smiles when she mentions harmony and the
prosaic, He nods his head to her scars, He takes note of
her breasts and her collarbone, and He prescribes an opinion.

-XV
‘Fuckin sow, fuckin maw,
who does she think she is,
she can’t imagine
we could enjoi this burlesque?
Sedatives secreted under tongues,
filthy distorted physiognomy,
filthy dusty floors and walls
and rusted unsprung beds,
she can’t imagine
a private life.
Fuckin doctored cheeseburger
those reconstituted beef patty
lips, I can’t understand this.
Where are you Rory?
Where are you?’

-XVI
I am watching her die on camcorder
just for the Hell of it.

-XVII
‘I tell you this much.
When I woke with
hair tenderly parted

chest thumping
I walked to your room
swung the door

and what I saw
in morning blues
sleeping fragile

was you, love.'

*

Dedicated to KABW

Russian Doll House

No recycling boxes stacked outside the backdoor
or puddles of rainwater within them,
no wriggling mosquito larvae here,
so no relentless malaria.

No squeaking bronze weathervane
or bituminous roof underneath,
so no crows with straw in their beaks
stolen from the horse's bed.

No accountant in the world
could submit a fiscal audit
of the tax year end and how
I came to kill my friend.

Fragile
porcelain/
figurative
shelter.

On Zwarovski and Krispy Kreme

pristine
crystal
ducks and swans
strangulate the menageries
‘O elucidation
like butter
gone rancid
at the back of the fridge

laszji tu th hurss
y justtig
si
justtig

ma allawys laszjig

and
as compensation
for bad weather
a fine selection of bakeries
and bleak films
in black and white

laszji tu th hurss
y justtig
o’r attha moor

here
now
doughnuts
all the way from
the usa

lashed to the horse
and jousting
yes
jousting

but always lashed

Happy Birthday My Friend

News International

It'ws hard to get
away from the hurricane
in autumn,

drenching
withered lanes
in diesel clouds,

staccato
carburettors
punching out birdsong,

and overboiled
meridian
lines

choke holding
this Indian summer.
We

gathered our friends
and tag’d their feet
when

even
the stars were meaning-
less.

We dug
a hole
for them.

And

afore th’
atrocity
was recorded

by historians,
(who have no
module

for the
fragrance
of decay)

we saw
more dead bodies
and rubber tyres

floating
past the library roof
like a computer game.

Senseless -
this isometric
despair,

as a stretch
of Rocky Mountains
that dips

away from the horizon
and into a docile
lake unseen -

senseless.
Now,
after

the hardbacks
sold out
and comissioned

memorials
blossom with fig
and cherry pollen

in autumn renewed,
there is only
the hole

filled in

to remind us
of the calm
before,

and
after,
the storm.

A Pub Joke

The narrator, the hero and his dog are sat around a faux oak table in a rural public house. The fire is built up with logs and pine cones. It is unlit. The dog stares out of the window at a gang of ducks and is smoking aggressively, wreathing the heads of nearby diners with voluptuous forms of acrid cancer. The narrator is naked, his ivory and blue skin speckled with melanomas. A heroic cloak hangs from the shoulders of the hero, and the dog wears a red leather collar with the name 'Antonin' engraved upon a small golden medallion. The hero is examining a laminated wine, beer and aperitif menu.

'I think I'll have a large glass of Black Tower', he announces at length.

Antonin coughs into his cigaret. 'And for you, narrator?'
'Nothing for me'.
'Nothing? You must have something. We've not come all this way for you to sit morosely in the corner watching our inebriation.'
'Nothing.'
Antonin shrugs and kills his cigar. 'I'll have a Armagnac'.

The hero stands and walks through a crowd of collared middlemen, slips to the bar and places the order. 'A large glass of Black Tower, a triple Armagnac and a single Creme de Menthe please barman.'

On returning to the table with the tray, he discovers that the narrator has, as usual, lost interest in the day and is slumped across the table, his intestines having been auto-jugged by a broken ashtray. Black blood is spreading inexorably across the varnished table and stipling with a pitpatpitpat onto the Morris floral print carpet.

H: 'Oh bloody hell. I bought him a Creme de Menthe too.'
A: 'I'm going to light a fresh cigar and toss the smouldering match into the grate of the fire, which will catch due to the updraft of the chimney.'
H: 'Here dog, lick the blood up will you?'
A: 'Fuck off - I'm not a pig. My penis does not spiral.'
H: 'See the football?'
A: 'I heard it. Who are you, Tolstoy?'
H: 'No, but I agree with him that Nietzsche was a ridiculous human being.'
A: 'Shall we go skiing this Christmas?'
H: 'Oh cute tangent! And I suppose you will want to carry brandy in a barrel about your neck?'
A: 'All this smoke feels decent and human, yet still I crave oxygen.'
H: 'You're only human and decent.'
A: 'I can smell old Martini and Rothmans Royals infused in the pile.'
H: 'The fire is burning.'
A: 'Well let's just shut the fuck up and enjoi it.'
H: 'What's this?'

(He waves his wrist wildly at the snout of the dog and emits a piercing yell)

A: 'What?'
H: 'Terrorist.'

*

'It is a dim light you cast,

distant star.

Shine on in the sunrise

toward which you lend no part.'

William Carlos Williams

The Poetic Manifesto of Rock and Roll

Pseudo-metacritical debates on music debase the fuck you integrity of the art-form, so I will attempt to speak quietly and from my own experience. Are we in agreement that art is a representative model of the subtle strata of human conditions? Do we believe that the paradox of sculpture is that it represents the fluidity of form in the medium of immobile stone?

Rock and roll exacerbates the impulses of the pack, the gang, the school, the pride. It gives us a home away from home. But is not the nature of meaning in music that I wish to explore, not when there have been so many before me who have covered and lidded and shrink wrapped the subject in the time capsule of posterity. I wish to explore the psychological implications of band structure.

The four piece band acts as a functional model for our interpersonal relationships, through love, sex and friendship.

Guitar and vocals are the external voice, the spoken word; the promise. The soprano hooks of your lover’s voice soothe the pounding syncopation of polemic emotions that pulse within; the tenor screams of a child awake at the witching hour, resurrecting the cremated.

Bass and drums are the internal monologue; the private. The alto rhythms of circulation and bone remind us we are not alone, a savage invigoration of the crude biology of loneliness.

The three piece band acts as a dysfunctional model, manifested as the schizoid, corrupted despair of the humble lover neglected in a ménage à trois.

Guitar and vocals no longer comply with the standard question/answer format; instead all is imbalance and ego, an unmanageable destiny, a cavalcade of unanswerable postulations.

Bass and drums rupture the relationship with their isolated horizons, their soporific white noise. Here they have mutated into a public conformity, a platform upon which the singer may tell his solitary stories.

The two piece band plays out the deific designs of a biopic relationship, uncomplicated, simple and purely driven by the parabolic waltz between deadly sins and immortal charity.

Here, all sound is created tangentially. It is the arithmetic telepathy of shared love.

The solitary performer is the soapbox radical, the loser. All sound issues forth from within and there is no answer. There are no backing singers with harmonies on the fourths and the ninths. The soul is stripped back and beaten flat. There are no bass and drums, no anatomy of kisses, no palatable loneliness – only the artist performing the summary of his cumulative exhorts.

But wait! We are forgetting the world around us. There is and will always be the echo of perfection – you the molten audience. You the audience, the validators of isolation.

We play for you off-key and warped by feedback, we play for you strung out and strung up, we play for you because we love you. We will continue exponentially until there is no reason for art to provide a model of suffering and bliss. Until the crystalline naivety of the Utopian dream has finally been realised. Until the midnight when the earth’s core has been entirely pillaged of ores and there are no guitar strings. Until you lose interest.

Until we are dead.

*

"All magazines slavishly follow

a line of thinking

and as a result

they despise

thought"

Artaud - Cup and Ball

Lama Sabachthani

1: There's an exhibition in the empty church
2: Our men are returning from the Gulf
1: Art is everywhere
2: Congregate for the scattering of ashes
1: The Korean Presbyterians play football in the graveyard
2: Do me a line

(cocaine is chopped)

1: Banknote?

2: Keep the change

1: The Prussian cavalry were without fear

2: Salud

(snort)

1: So he who makes a beast of himself/

2: Eradicates the pain/

1: Of being a man

2: God is a car thief

1: There's a brothel in the monastery

2: Our women are missing in action

1: Sex is everywhere unjustified

2: Standing room only. No flowers

1: No flowers

2: Lend me a pill

(a pharmaceutical blister is produced)

1: Down the hatch

2: Reflex-Responses normal

1: Israeli Galils painted with pink vines

2: Merci

(swallow)

1: The very concept of freedom/

2: To commit suicide/

1: Falls like a cut down tree

2: God is mercurial

1: A broken rosary in a bedside cabinet

2: We'll have the wake at the Holiday Inn

1: No flowers

2: No flowers

1: And you'll observe the physics of velvet

2: Tuck me in grandpa, I'm cold

1: A circle is alays the strangest shape

2: Drop me a tab

(perforated blotter is torn)

1: Now find an apex and be prepared to cling to it as you do my thinking for me upon this seared, boiling ocean. There may be only room for one within your coracle but there will always be another, hanging from the bow and kicking you to the calm shallow reefs, defying the sharks ith a drift of blood. Salt water is a great healer. Navigate at your will using the constellations as a map and if the clouded sky has lidded such perspective, trust the words of your lover. Find an apex within the strangest shape and cling to it, or else succumb to the depths. Others in time will observe the physics of velvet pulleys. I will always break the cardinal rules. I will always bring flowers.

2: The bed is beginning to revolve/

1: Eventually/

2: It will turn completely upon itself

1: And impale you upon a designed construct/

2: Of hell

1: But the churches are empty, the monasteries corrupt, the Vatican anachronous and so/

2: There is no hell

1: Like the devil scorned

The Waiting Game

1: Exhaust note reprisals performed in turbo diesel
2: Symphonic?
1: As a foam stress ball/
2: Flux
1: People people people dickheads people
2: I know/
1: A passing car stereo
2: It's neverending
1: Y-U-S-E-F. You say it to me
2: Pink, ochre, Rajasthani cream
1: And so silence only in the darkest hour before dawn
2: Even the drunkards of Westminster are scared
1: Vapour trail cirrans
2: Harmonic?
1: Quadrophonic/
2: As a slapdash dissertation on Business
1: People people people lover people
2: I don't know
1: Jesus
2: Yes my child?
1: Are you omnipotent?
2: I am impotent. They sterilised me
1: La jeune fille grose et tranquille
2: Ultramarine, grey, Brasilica cyan
1: A new development in oil paint
2: And in that darkest hour I held her hand to my relentless heart
1: I wish it would stop
2: Granted
1: Even the junkies of Jericho are scared
2: Hexagonal sunshine math/
1: Compassion?
2: For the cunt in the BMW? Yes mate
1: People people people people
2: Pins and needles
1: A private smile
2: So fragile, almost a warrior. Outmoded
1: A public smile/
2: Facile
1: On matters of pronunciation your authority is instinctive
2: Even the picnic upon the summer hill plays host to a swarm of bacteria
1: Chemo screams
2: Therapeutic illness
1: Lavender, marjolen, time
2: I have never been happier than this morning when she woke me
1: Oh. You're crying
2: It is ferocious
1: Wait

(silence)

1: Algerian imagination
2: Your diction is spat/
1: Civilian war
2: We are the pedestrians
1: A sore neck
2: And so loud now in the bright daylight of noon
1: God damn your despair
2: I am faithful
1: Cheat
2: People people people baby people
1: RSVP to my despair
2: Futile
1: Reluctantly
2: In love

(silence)

1: Learn to recognize the sirens
2: People people Kentucky fried motherfuckers
1: With primary care needs?
2: People/
1: Robots
2: Wordsworth
1: Cobalt, granite, graphite
2: Who cares?
1: Those under the yashmak veil
2: Who cares?
1: Those drunkards junkies and lovers
2: Oh - you're bleeding
1: Naturally
2: Wait.

(silence)
(they kiss)

1: Plagiarise a conclusion...
2 I am in love with you.

*

We know nothing

pure and simple

beyond our own complexities

(William Carlos Williams)

2 Commemorated

Football Season Is Over

"No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun -- for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax -- This won't hurt."


*


Benaud's Last Stand

It was a tense and overcast Surrey Oval that willed the England cricket team to a series victory as they finally regained the Ashes from Australia yesterday.
While pitched rooves and scaffolding of properties adjacent to the Vauxhall ground were hijacked by supporters, and the reinvigorated crowd in the stands sung to a lone trumpet, those enjoying the game at home bade a quiet farewell to 'the voice of cricket', Richie Benaud.
Shortly after tea on the final day, the Channel 4 commentator wryly stated: "It's been fun", and climbed out of the box to end a 42 year career in English cricket broadcasting.
As a leg-spinner and captain of Australia, he never lost a series while in charge, becoming the first player to score over 10,000 runs and take over 500 wickets in the process.
In commentating, Benaud's deception is to let the game speak for itself, providing only occasional score updates and piquant one-liners, and this is why he has earned the respect of players, coaches and fans globally.
He understands the nature of both sport and sportsmanship. A true pioneer of televised sports journalism and an outstanding leader of his country, Benaud’s legacy will inspire future generations of players, press and pundits alike.

porno math problem

hair crescent the girl with pale skin and long
slender limbs lies across the concrete prostrate.

meanwhile,
he dances up the estuary beach like ginger
hands in pockets whistling a show tune
off key.

the girl with dark hair gasps a name
and you ask me what's in it?

boredom.

desire thus - narcissus vs me

so she wears only jeans

crux upon the altar of a front door step
but pinned
posterized and tense

hands ripping pants > snarling in stockings

red sky at night > incandescant

meanwhile
he skates across the south bank
with headphones on listening
to nothing.

the girl with the dark hair is
blonde.

desire.

boredom thus - desire x desire

Harmonic Cinema

Therese ripped the front door from its hinges with a shoulder barge. Splintered pine fell gradually from the frame as she screamed gibberish intoxicated, her mascara streaked. In her bra a slim paperback was tucked, curled around the curve of her breast. A black and gold soviet Ziganov grimaced between her lips. As she turned and walked to the drinks cabinet I noticed that she had been fighting again, as the back of her Mara jacket was studded with crazed safety glass. I arose from the crimson leather armchair slowly.

'Shhh', I signed, approaching her. She started to scream again so I pulled the starting pistol from my dressing gown and fired it at her face. Starlings on the windowsill took flight. She dropped her absinthe glass and glared at me as I observed the regal progress of the viscous green sucrose across the chequerboard floor.

'Zamaluje Cie', she whispered dynamically, removed a paint brush from her clasp bag and pointed it in turn at me.

We stood there for thirty seconds engaged thus, waiting for signs, for movement. When her concentration lapsed with a brief blink and I threw the weapon at her head as hard as I could. She ducked down and it missed but I landed a kick upon the top of her skull with my slippered foot. She fell to the floor stunned and I pounced, cuffing her arms behind her neck in the Los Angeles deadgrip and ripping her crackly tights from beneath her skirt.

'No cunt no!' she shouted and kicked me hard in the balls. I gagged and fell foetal as she stood gasping and ran, cuffed, to the covenant draw. My face was covered in absinthe and minor lacerations and it stung like guilt. I watched her remove a loaded hypoderm.

'You'll never do it', I said quietly, my strength returning. Surgical spirit dripped off the needle and splashed like tears upon her chest. She turned to look at me.

Her perfect lips hovered over her naked bruised leg, the needle aimed. Her mouth opened in half frames and the syringe fell straight and true like a dart, sinking deep into the flesh. She doubled her abdomen over and pushed the plunger down. There was a momentary pulsation in her temple and her eyelids flickered, then a utopian simple smile expanded across her and she dropped sideways upon the floor.

*

The camera rises up and holds in the chandelier position, observing the plan of this room. The red chair. The opened draw. The spilt alcohol. The woman. The man. The debris. Finally it moves up through the ceiling and accelerates exponentially, away from the balletic skyline of nocturnal Paris and on towards distant stars.

15 Photographs I Took At Your Funeral

(I)
Maggots catapulted over the forgotten millpond
scattered like lead fizz from a shotgun.
Fish rose from their depths.

(II)
My awkward tattoos, mourner's prayers and brokered
tongue spoke of loss unknown.
Death in hyperbole.

(III)
Toffee popcorn in pewter urns
on the long solemn oak table of your wake.
Sticky fingers.

(IV)
Girls in white dresses huddled on iron benches
in the evergreen shadow of an ancient
ewe tree.

(V)
My collar would not fasten.
The priest scolded me in his biblical fashion:
decisive vehemence.

(VI)
Souvenir matchbooks with emerald heads
ignited in dense clouds of cordite
for chuckling cigars. I choked.

(VII)
Boys in black suits spiralled together
to contest who of them knew you best.
They spat on the loch path.

(VIII)
The swifts hunted oblivious, their automated
wing bones conditioning the winds with
Africa.

(IX)
Excuse me? I'd like
one of the family now.
Smile.

(X)
The stars spin like a discus
or maybe it's the raw ether
of cheap gin.

(XI)
The recycled papyrus bus billet
perforated with journeys
will always be One Way.

(XII)
The black Ferrari Modena
showed us how far we had come
on our own.

(XIII)
You looked into me with hunger
as we waltzed under transient
confetti.

(XIV)
A golden pipe organ
that played
intrusive Bach.

(XV)
Out of focus.

The River

theres no magic anymore
how quick we forget the past
creation strangler
loss subdued
fear hidden under angry beds
trying too hard
lay down
trying too hard
hair flowing
white glow headphones
venus
hair tyed
austere delight
eyes kohled
black
eyes burning
forgotten
and if we ever define love let me know
london is new
gothic cathedral
stone bench infatuation
glittering headquarters
tender leo
trophy cabinet of alcohol
give up everything for danger
boy meets girl
girl meets boy
dunno
but
phenomenonal
dont believe in miracles
goddess scarred
my life a harmonic fourth kiss in progress
dont remember syracuse
london is calling
remember the future
all this is meaningless
a predictive prayer
8 hail marys
and our fathers can go to hell
turquoise watch strap
milk band
the elegant bones in that hand
take care when we part
attic chamber bleeds lilac paint
dunno
oh!
shooting star!
meteor!
asteroid!
what was that about miracles?
gone
but not
forgotten
spo
radical
messages
and songs by lou reed
offkey solitaire
surrounded
surrendering
trying too hard
don't tell us! it won't come true!
moths on the ceiling
gunmetal grey frame
red morning light
we
awake
x

The Press

alarm clock circuitry shorted
under oxygenated water
spilt

cakrakaran tangents birth bala as
the mystics sculpt the rising sun

he needs us more than we need him
the business women unpoise wet

green flags
inflated function
emerald silk

candaka repeals the light of day
so fierce as to be invisible

genetic programming on dos basic
font the colour of biblical olives
eloi!

welsh marble
cascade mezzo
currency of wishes

arki eyes saturnine
inopiate and upwardly mobile
i wait for you

Petrolina

In a north-south facing hotel room on the top floor a man evaluates his black canvas. Cut crystal whiskey glass in hand, he paces the tile lines of the bathroom, schizoid restricted, a leopard. The epidural kicks in, the walls curved ellipsis forge hallucinations. Mantra: ‘It's just the drug it's just the drug.’ Coda. Down the hallway a television gameshow distributes power in Latin whilst outside, car horns and Malaccas squawk tropical in congress with the murderous humidity. The man opens a door and finds himself confronted with a terrifying vertiginous drop to the ground and a whipsnap wind. Cursing, he shuts the door and reads the sign which states: ’Do Not Open This Door’. Creation circulates wilfully like a mismatched transfusion as Sol Invictus himself fills the room with ultra spectrum light. The man roars.

*

Before the paint he is full of the nutrients of pregnancy. Before the paint he is well-fed and lucid. Before the paint he is qualified. Yet he knows that when the first line appears, he must follow it as his imagination, desire and ability instruct. Rage and rebellion against cerebral flow is recognised as futile. A resurgence of independence will be quashed like a backwater coup d’etat, a rural distraction. The first line has appeared.

*

Neither of the earth’s two moons are visible through the gauzed pollutant clouds tonight and so neon and phosphor bar signs combust sub-terrestrially, too big for themselves, too bright for the night, repelling moths and teenage prostitutes alike. Universal sinewaves have synchronised their tunings to B minor. A comet flares briefly.

*

He cannot mix a primary colour. Taking a blank compact disc from his bag he sits in the empty bathtub, breaks the disc into two complete halves and considers the brittle misshapen reflection that defies him in stereo. He cannot separate a primary colour. For hell he cuts his tan flesh, the idle painless indulgence of scoring bad poems into his skin. The controlled copperplate hand is unsuitable for verbose stanzas so he writes a broad allegory of dogs and desire, tearing through muscle and goosebump like a great artist should. The anti-coagulating steam molecules argue in B minor.

*

The man works at his canvas. He is painting a chocolate box in negative colours. He uses no models.

Jukebox 20p 2 Plays

A man and a girl sit around a table decorated with jellies, sponges, tea and coffee pots and tissue napkins which depict Bosch's garden of earthly delights. A fountain sings into the silence created by the girl turning a record on a simple gramaphone.
He offers a tray of fairy cakes iced with marmalade and nettle which she accepts whilst shielding her eyes from the curdled sky, grin guilty. Since his father was hospitalized the man has been aging badly, forgetting the day, and the lines spreading from his eyes speak of tomorrow. Kansa. A solitary piano plays.
The girl eats slowly and silently, removing small clusters of sponge with thumb and index. Her full pink lips are scarred, her eyes are an embrace.
'You cannot capture both the sun and your shadow in a photograph', he whispers, reading from the small book cradled upon his lap.
An aqueous ochre coy flops in the brown pond water.
'You remind me of Gretchen when we are alone', he says, looking up at the girl.
She lights a cigaret and passes it to him.
'Let's not do this ping-pong', she announces finally. He seems to like this. He smiles.
The church bells peal prayer hymns and the girl has rosary beads in her mouth. She sings to herself.
Six o'clock.
The man stands and flicks his cigaret. He approaches her.
'Let's go upstairs', she says.

*

The table rots in swarm clouds of lacewings, bluebottles and earwigs. Spore covered food decomposes. The church bells peal a prayer hymn, this waltz a soundtrack to orgy, absence and the dance of the flies. A mouse with sleek wet fur disappears into the brass horn of the gramaphone and the sky is lipid. Twelve o'clock.
In a corner sits a broken man, victim of a crash, both tibias rupturing up through the skin of his shins, his ribcage flesh lacerated and bone exposed, eyes rolled back, breathing in shallow, grabbing splashes like an old or beaten horse. His head slumps forward. He is bleeding from the nostrils and his left eye is green.
A small notebook sits cradled in his lap. The clinical odours of propane and bonfires can be smelt.
The man gasps as he reaches into his pocket, retracting a rosary which he holds weakly to his chest.
The man dies. Insects lay eggs. In the pond, brittle dessicated frogspawn fossilises with the crusted sheen of a snail's path or petrol in a puddle.

*

Pearl

Diving

Hijack The Casino

no grasp on the fickle cavities of your ribcage colonel,
unseen brother of mine and commander fuckwit
alight with dyspepsia: hyenas we are out to get you
and you and you

no time like the presence of god in your dead eyes
to wrap up warm and storm the embassy
with red fibrous ties knotted about the brow,
like rambo or some other marine cunt

no christ thank god,
we ain't seen nothin yet of Him,
but my springfield mag is stocked gold and pointed
upwards for the first shot at spiritual allusions

make head
make tail
infinite side to the coin
we'll kick off the away end

and

to all provost and bluster -
no thanks boss
milkshake and cerebellum
hand in hand.

rest your palsy in asphodel
aspidistra
whatever the local blossom

rest your eyes replete
in thimbles of vinegar
of the white wine genus

rest your syntax
upon the finest pivot
of unbalanced fractions

its on again ... it's on and we made our choices
to boogie stop shuffle off this exponential curve
as blue eyed scalpels and blond haired die
hand in hand in hand at the roulette wheel
oh yes we made our choices on 00
in the vain hope that one of us would
kick down the door of central office
and set about the governors with humanity
and what do you know?

i shot the hyenas
you shot god
he shot all these governors
we shot the boss

your number is up colonel,
please proceed
quietly
to the sorting office.


third exit on your left.

no smoking.

lomo

Absence

you sense me unhinged
cymbals and symbols splashing
stretched upon the table
like the sky anaesthetized

fighting for devices
to confound your green irises

hold my hand

you think me an image
celluloid
developed
in thin air

but as i go
i talk
to my simple heart

and to you

you think me an abstract
absurd nonsensica
sickening
the arteries

my soul dissolves
in the petridish
dictionary

of definitions

of love

you stroke my hair
from my eyes
shunted
with industry

i do everything
to find you
i do nothing
and lose you

grand couplets
our time
disappears

and reappears
replayed
unique

ceiling fans chop

alone
together

at last

at peace

the stereo is on repeat
tonight

what you can't tell is that i'm playing timberlake and singing castrato.

england

i am english.
we english are huge malcontents,
flocking in droves to mediterranean europe
because we think that we have nothing.
but yet we often neglect to look for it in the first place,
to know our country,
to be proud of it's singular,
spectacular landscapes,
urban/urbane
rural/pastoral.

if you are english and disenchanted,
walk.
walk out to where you are alone,
a forest,
a valley,
a mountain,
do it when everything is collapsing around you,
sweat out your madness for a while.

we were called great because we led the way,
now we are hurling spears at progression.

its a damned shame.

spike milligan says

if i die in war
you remember me
if i live in peace
you don't.

*

a clever title here

picture Rodin's thinker. everyone knows it,
even if they don't know its significance,
still it is a mighty piece of fine art and
craftsmanship.

it is the stereo-typical image of philosophy,
misconceived as deep thought. It is ubiquitous,
from clinton greeting cards to roy walker's
catchphrase, the fist screwed into the brow,
the supressed power, that incurable joy for life
found in the greatest sculptor's works.

now, as an unashamed layman of the subject
of philosophy, you will have to excuse
my polarised 23 year old view. all i know is that
philosophy should be liberating.

it should enlighten your concerns of issues
with serenity where you may have been consumed
with the self/ external obsessions we all suffer,
and, as a brief aside, it is maybe in
this sense that philosophy becomes atheistic,
with it's surrogacy of the compassion of god
and his children.

so with this approach in mind, thinking, as i am,
from the bench in the woods, lying on my back
looking at stars, all fairly normal, i have to bring up
my objection, my dissatisfaction with Rodin's thinker
and especially with the public image it has come
to represent:

thought should not be seen to be oppressed,
it should not be the image of Seneca resting his weary
head upon gnarled hands crutched upon the rounded
end of his cane. there is no celebration of the triumph
of original, political, creative, intelligent thought
in this image.

it is oppression.

this is how it is: people don't get the allegory
of the thinker's form. when people recall the thinker's image
in their minds, it is always subdued and foetal. they don't get
the sense of politics oppressing the thinker, the context of his form,
just the weight of serious thought upon his shoulders.

so, in this tragic era of what a certain clan of unimaginatives
like to deem 'P.R.', philosophy needs to be not thought of as so
bookish, so quiet, so oppressive, it needs a P.R. makeover,
and don't balk - it's sadly true.

we moderns, and we are at
a cultural recycling depot currently,
we need philosophy as much, if not more than ever,
but perhaps we don't realise it.
we need liberation
from the sound pollution,
i tell you - the cities subhuman elemental roar
unnerves us, it is not natural - i'm with Darwin.

we need emancipation through thought,
from fear and crime,
introspection and one night stands,

it's the only way,
the only true way,
for the people to develope to great happiness,
contentment and joy.

we need to think a bit more clearly.

*

~my mother says we need a revolution

and if she dies without me even trying

she will be very sad.~

bamboo

bamboo is the fastest growing plant in the world,
one foot a day.
you have bamboo canes in the garden,
the thin young shoots browned and splintering
used to prop up everything from runner and broad beans
to black nylon raspberry nets.

and if you're young you use them as swords
with your sisters and brothers until
someone gets whipped across the arm,
on the knuckle, or, agony and tears,
the back of the hand.

bamboo canes have notches in,
every foot apart,
a six foot cane is
a six day old shoot
with darkness seperating the stems of life, light,
each days growth stunted by bands of night.

Po Mo Mo Fo

bite my lips!
a secret text #
infused with a ~new~ poison

solaris * eclipses
on a car bonnet
a kickin
+
a screaminnnnn
=

//strangled// to Aerosmith
"to close my eyes"
and \\splinterin\\ ribs
"to miss a beat"

(southern cross
burns sequential
in the birdbath)

shoot the blues

cause:

i love this dead girl

fuck you sponge!
fuck you reader!

i loved this girl

for ever

forever

&

ever

My Name Here

The Smartest Kid On Earth

Daddy - http://quimby.gnus.org/warehouse/

Nationalism

An epic skin of day,
the sun fierce at nine and low on it's climb,
and from the Green Hills of Africa
on the subject of Masai mentality:

'They had that attitude that makes brothers,
that unexpressed but instant and complete acceptance
that you must be a Masai wherever it is you come from.
That attitude you only get from the best of the English,
the best of the Hungarians and the very best Spaniards;
the thing that used to be the most clear distinction of nobility
when there was nobility.'

And how the French resent it!
And the Americans too, I fear.
For having given up on nobility in all it's systems,
they justly now regard the inferior English,
the lesser Hungarians and the prosaic Spanish
with contempt and pity.

But faced with one of us who has it blooded,
through centuries of dying in peace
unremembered, poor,

faced with us now,
they become flustered and pale
in comparison.

Disinterest, this is it,
a disinterested friendliness,
a friendly provocation,
a provocative joke,
a joking disinterest -

none of that zealous,
forged jewelleryof smiles and handshakes
and questions fucking questions
and compliments,
dewy skin,
religion -

so lacking in adventure and magic
and curiosity as to what's in the draw,
and holding a fallen bird's nest with eggs
like some delicate crown
as real as jewellery...

a dislike of lengthy conversations,
a whisper to a child:
'when an adult looks very serious
he or she is usually thinking about
when to wash the car,
or what to have for dinner'
and delighted giggles.

Shhh.

But it is an ignorant thing
and those who have it
do not survive.

Long Live America,
Vive La France.

Dogs

Act woke me in the morning pulling on my blanket.

'Tea'.
'Bloody tea', I said sitting up still asleep and prising my eyes open.

Green light banded the canvas entrance, a clear day, and I took the mug with both hands.

'We're moving to the north side of the river, there's a gang of travellers turned up in the night. '
'Bad travellers or good?'
'I heard acid trance at first light,' he said. 'You would have too if you ever woke up for life.'
'I don't want to move, this is a good southern spot, look at the light sheafs and listen to the silence.'

Immediately upon this declaration, a huge explosion of bass and synth showered mud and beetles over the roof of the tent. I climbed up out of bed holding the patterned blanket about my waist and peered under the entrance flap. Outside, whooping and drunk, a tribal dance of dreadlocked hypercoloured vagrants circled an indecent plastic fire, arms locked and then unlocked and flailing. Empty grey cider bottles lay around our small camp space and not five metres away a large blue bus that appeared to be some kind of reclaimed military ambulance, painted with yellow flowers, hung with superstition, had been parked. A toddler sitting on the sidesteps of the ambulance waved shyly at me. I pulled myself back in.

'Are you packed?' I said.
'Yes, but I can't find the tobacco tin.'
'Three guesses.'
'Oh no.'
We both fell to the ground to have another look out.
'Why is it you only ever see such people with rollies, and always smoked to within a fraction of the roach, and never lit, just clamped to the lips?'
'They'd regard a full cigaret as bourgeois.'
'Oh poor misunderstood Karl Marx.'
'There it is look!' Act whispered excitedly. 'Over there, next to that guy with the dog.'

I looked over to the other side of the fire. A dirty mongrel was throwing beer cans and polystyrene into the fire with arcing shots, absently, dead eyed, the look of someone at the end of a difficult trip. His dog looked immaculate, clean, dangerous. In front of the dog was the green and gold tin, quite visible, propped up on one side.

'How do they roll with paws?'
'I've got a plan,' Act said. 'Let's pack up your tent, make to move off, then you ask them for directions. If there's one thing a traveller loves, its giving directions to the lost.'
'That doesn't sound very convincing.'
'No, you wait and see. They're the type to form a mob. They'll be round you like vultures, weighing you up, telling you where to go and how to get there and when the best time of morning is for finding liberty caps.'
'And what are you going to do while I fend them off?'
'Give the dog some beans and get the tobacco.'
'Dogs don't eat beans!'
'A travelling dog will eat anything.'

So I climbed out of the tent, pulling on jeans and a white t-shirt, which I immediately sloshed tea over, and helped Act to collapse the camp.

'Tea shirt.'
'Go to hell. Where's the peg-bag?'
'You want any help there boys?' said a gloomy looking woman, peering at us with some intent as she leaned on a stick covered in ribbons and bells. We had quite plainly finished packing, our world lay in bags around us, and I thought the woman looked like a miserable fake, like a receptionist kidnapped and duped, foreign to herself and hostile.
'Yeah actually,' I began, pulling the crumpled splitting map from my back pocket and kicking a bundled sleeping bag to one side as I approached, an unconsidered, casual kick.
'Do you know the best place to pick mushrooms round here?'
I could sense Act giving me a look, a warning to provocation.
Her eyes lit up and she launched into a spitting monologue on the subject of psilocybin, and I could smell the ingested spores of time passed right there on her breath, her hideous white, spotty cleavage unnecessarily close to the map, the tranquil aura of damp morning woodland hunts everywhere in her suppression of self. The whole thing stank. Others were coming in to listen, eyeing me up and down.

A woman with a beard who presently became a man said to me, ' 'ere, what's all that brown shit on your shirt? Is that tea? Ha Ha Ha! Tea Shirt.'
'Yes Ha Ha Ha.'
'Looks like someone shat on your chest mate - you like that kind of thing do ya?' said another of my new friends with wild hair and even wilder wit, apparently.
'It looks like someone shat on your head mate', I wanted to petulantly answer, but didn't of course, for at this moment I could see Act had manoeuvred himself as naturally as possible to the exit, bags under arms, all calm and waiting by the pristine guard dog and the comatose hippy.
My hairy pal continued. 'What do you want anyway? Have you got any milk you could give us?'
'They want to know about mushrooms, where to pick 'em and that...' said the woman sharply, irritated that she might lose control, like a receptionist flustered.
I had almost all of the camp around me now, or at least watching.

And as I thought wildly for some new tactic to appeal to these people, I saw in the background Act's hand go down slowly towards the tin. He seemed to be straightening up and I was just about to leave when suddenly the dog struck.

Act yelled and there was the doberman hanging off his forearm growling and slobbering, shaking side to side ripping the flesh, flecks of muscle about the beast's muzzle. Act was yelling in pain, and as I ran over a traveller with a plank of wood beat Act around the head. Act fell to the floor unconscious and the dog let go.

'Never get Armand off 'im otherwise,' he said to me, as I watched transfixed, 'always better to play dead or knock 'em out.'
I knelt by Act, whose arm was a bloody mess, his eyes rolled back in his head. I slapped him firmly about the cheek a couple of times and he blearily winced into consciousness.
'Serves 'im right for tryin to thieve my weed,' said the hitherto comatose wanderer righteously clutching his tin. His tin.

And sure enough, digging into my back pocket, I realised there was a tobacco tin.

I picked Act up and slung his arm around my shoulder, hung various bags about his neck and carried the rest, hobbling away from the cackling party down the path by the river.

'Why didn't you use the beans?' I asked, 'you said a travelling dog would eat anything.'
'I couldn't find the tin opener,' Act replied miserably, through clenched teeth.
I looked down at the road as we hobbled together and in doing so noticed something silvered in the side pocket of his shorts.
'It's right there you idiot. In your shorts.'
'Oh god. I hate reliance,' Act said weakly, sweating, 'and what was he saying about stealing his weed?'
'Nothing, nothing. You know what those travellers are like. Stories from out of nowhere. Let's hitch to a hospital.'

And we staggered off into the gathering, mellow, early-morning sun.

Lomo

My Property

Mugabe took my baby back to Africa
bankrupt and unkissed with noticed
eviction of people from their land.

We met in Old Orleans on a normal
British night and stood together
laughing at the jukebox, I remember.
Slender to the point of abstraction,
in a darkened council house bedroom
she gave me definitions and stories.

In a Toyota flatbed bouncing unsprung
through declining pampas grasses
and past startled dispersing gazelles
her family fled.
Mother's shuddering shoulders
wept into an empty plastic bag
and diesel clouds belched over their
poor white linen. Father smoked
and locked down the distance.

There is now no address or contact,
and nothing I can say in protest
at the shock
of such policy in action

will bring her back.

Flight

There is a small whitewashed block that sits modern and alone in central Strasbourg and for much of the day it broadcasts reflections from the glistening headquarters of the European Union like a bold full moon. A brushed aluminium intercom system and a poster for a passing circus lend colour to the walls as sleek grey German automobiles are disgorged from the black pit of the subterranean parking lot.

Routine is everywhere: people set their watches by automated pedestrian crossings, by tolling church bells, ever oblivious to this bold full moon, squat, irregular, phosphorescent as the hands on a wristwatch.

In summer, trees wilt with the weight of exhaust and pure heat and in the winter there are no trees, there is no circus.

Children suffer under droning aeroplanes that carry delegates and holiday makers alike. Test scores are down as pylons breed leukaemia and in the midst of this hideous melange -

a man in a charcoal suit with an angry neck hunts for his absent daughter, lifting great bushes of aspidistra, scouring the cool dark car-park, yelling her name.

From where I sit, on the wrought iron balcony of the anonymous hotel over the road I can see the girl, who wears a pair of dusty jeans and some headphones around her neck, I can see this girl well hidden from the father's perspective, crouching behind a large, empty flower urn, and I can't take my eyes off her. But in a moment she disappears around the corner, gone.

Heimlich Manoeuvre (BackSlap)

Too good
to be
true

http://circletide.blogspot.com/2005/06/old-days.html

Slow Release In Quartal Chimes

A simple long straight road through corn stretches out
to jealousy.
A flock of hooded crows rise together, maudlin on bruising thermals.
A clapping wingcase shaded by a lack of natural development.
A diesel generator freezing coronas in a rumbling refrigerator.

And what of I? I feel fine. I feel fine. I feel I am Fine.

A spiral canter the two of us upon a rich beach head
but solitary.
A word out of place giving lie to small truths and franchises.
A sun on diagonals from the dunes with their tallgrass paedophiles.
A mother's warning, the weather may change.

And what of A? Crying at A loss when I am here. Crying.

At a loss we met slumped by the side of the straight silent road
and it was gravities aromas that made me touch a hand
and from that moment I was not prepared
to let go.

Pokharan Maoism

And she remembers Pokhara as a girl,
monkeys on a glass lake
and fish dancing at dusk for mosquitos,
where in a rowing boat
clouds became snow.
Tracking back through the forest
to find the source of the waterfall,
a monk
paddling to the monastery
in a coracle
called to her in rural vernacular
a gesture of friendship, recognition.

Secular Maoist insecurity and honest people
breeding degeneration
under the caps of the Annapurnas -
distant monoliths shifting,
melting,
sinister spectators of cheap blockades
decrying embargos on rice
and corpses off trail,
shot.

The bookshops stayed open throughout
the strike and she ate dhal in silence
listening to the sad slap of boot on tarmac
outside, a stone's throw
as vibrant and final as prayer
pennants whipcracked
by Tibetan winds.

The bus explodes
with euphoric gunfire,
quiet and warm a bang bang
game with a simple article
and a definite end,
a manifestation of will
as we go about our day
away from the violence
on campus.

We never did find the source of the waterfall.

http://bryanferrysmoustache.blogspirit.com

check it out tossers

Notes From My Sponsors

cashout

on the morning of the first eviction
they carried out the wishes of the landlord and his son
furniture's out on the sidewalk next to the family
that little piggie went to market,
so they're kicking out everyone

talking about process and dismissal
forced removal of the people on the corner
shelter and location

everybody wants somewhere

the elected are such willing partners
look who's buying all their tickets to the game
development wants, development gets it's official
development wants this neighborhood gone
so the city just wants the same

talking about process and dismissal
forced removal of the people on the corner
shelter and location

everybody wants somewhere

everybody wants somewhere

lomo

lomo - adam

lomo - newcastle

Disintegration Loop

Flux till you schism:
exponents of slow death swirl
in our journals.

A sublime manufacturing process
that claws at horizons
best left
oblique,

horizons which will not photograph,
sub contrast, spring grey
clay mould effluents,

this kind of thing,
y'know,
marmalade skies,
a dulled sense of pantomime,
reportage from the town hall,
dull.

I used to have a function,
clean brown hair,
affected rhythm,

and a love
all our own,

but it appears
indecision
illuminates my
lack.

This is what they mean
by the definition

of schism.

lomo

A Really Upbeat Suicide Note

Lapsing into unmetered prose the hallmark of immaturity,
y'know.

It's been so long since someone gave me confidence
that I've been considering applying to Oxford, with
an overdrawn personal statement and a mother yanking
shirts off the wet washing line.

Happily, I do not have sufficient understanding
to control the ambiguities of words, instead left
to rejoice in the
chaos effect.

A bad poet misunderstood like a whiny teenager,
so equally tedious.

I took a photograph and somebody said:
'I think you've got a talent there.'
Ridiculous! Pressing a button once - jesus it disillusions me
to provoke this reaction when I have punched the buttons
of this keypad a million times or more creating the same,
spectral, abstract images - better perhaps. Surely there is
a nobility in the pigheaded determination
of desperate escapist writing?

No one gets the irony, too oblique, or
notices the vague, beaten humour. No one can be bothered,
and I certainly don't blame them, for nor can I.

So having already set out this stall with despondency
like a phone cover saleman at a pikey market,
I find nowhere to go but on.

If it can be broken then it can be fixed
If it can be fused then it can be split
All you need is time, All you need is time
All you need is time, All you need is.........

If it can be broken then it can be fixed
If it can be fused then it can be split
It's all under control, It's all under control
It's all under control, It's all under control....

And:

Wake up dreamer, it's happening without you.
Comb your hair and shave your beard,
You squandered all your chances.

Clearly it's not just me then, giving up.
The generational malaise, the lack of cultural definition,
the lethargy of hungover youth:
listen to the popular alternative music.
Rebellion no longer inspires the artists.

I wish I were an artist, or a musician,
you know, keeping things linear.
There's no ambiguity in paint or chord sequences.
In interpretation and inspiration of original works -
certainly. But in the materials of construction - no.
I am sorry, but for me - no.

Waking you up to close the bar
Streets wet you can tell by the sound of cars
Bartender singing clementine
While he's turning around the open sign

'Dreadful sorry, oh oh,
clementine.'

Like Stephen Fry said, sometimes I look at photos
of that happy little toddler in his romper suit, and
I feel like apologising.
Where did the unique qualities of beauty disappear to?
Why am I not a supermodel.
Disregard your first answer.

I walked silently with my friend, labouring up
the footpath that cuts a narrow embankment
between a field of wheat on one side and
sheep in lamb on the other, the air whipping
dandelion spores for today only, a release
of the genie's wishes, hope discarded.

So definitely FUCK this useless blog:
the time for experimenting with form and device
is over,
I get two treasured viewers a day,
have petulantly disabled the comments box,
am writing dross like this, debasing self
and creating nothing
but a series of disconnected images
like a bad arthouse film.

I feel a genuine embarrassment that there are some
charitable and talented people out there, some
personal acquaintances, who have provided a link
to this site out of a sense of disconnection and
misplaced duty. Thankyou.

So I'm going to write my surreal
children's book next,
and like all those other unwritten books in my head:
May a happy accident
make it work,
May a working accident
make it happen.

And finally:
Anyone of you (two) still reading who hasn't yet checked
out the link on the right entitled Penis Fingers, needs to do so.
That is if you like sexy equestrians, dismembered naked men
and Jennifer Connolly depicted as a retarded siamese twin.

Andrew Copp - I salute you as a true great
and the undeniable future of modern art,
for like all great artists appreciated in their time,
you instantly render all other artists,
with their twee urban graphics
and their drying screen prints,
as irrelevant,
tepid.

I'm off to get fucking wasted on every single drug
I can lay my hands on, which explains a lot about this site
that you didn't know.

Thanks for reading.

-and so it goes-

lomo

Pipes

Calling

http://www.forgetthings.blogspot.com/

recife

A Pram Race or, Youth Deposed

All year round the weaver's house awaited passover to July
Rays strong and honest as an unsophisticated girl. The pram race
An event of violence and colour, an A-bomb of youth repealing
Amidst the senile elm and flaccid larch.

We climbed high into the canopy of one such tree
Away from the crowds, you and me, our Luger and Colt 45
Loaded with innumerable yellow ball bearings, dear cheap
Ammunition. Below the burgers sizzled by the banks of the
Tillingbourne and flipflops squelched through the shallow ford in gay
Shrieks, that used to invoke an innocence undefiled. Here I owned
Both bridge and gremlins, punctured the soft, pulpy back of my hand
On a proud first stickleback caught
With bamboo, string, paperclip and earthworm.

Then the promised violence erupted: the gallery at first
Fell silent as the grating wheels and slapping plimsolls could be heard
Squeaking from up the lane, and a slow roaring cheer of alcohol
And loosened ties stacked up with their approach. I could see them
Coming, dressed as nurses, the lead pram screwacking about the bend
And on through the ford in a hail of hell flung water balloons, cream pies,
Pistols and the odd stray yellow pellet. Oh we gave 'em war, those
Competitors passing on their timed torture circuit.

A team of vicars waddled into view with a young verger
Wrapped up in the pram exhorting his cavalry, but suddenly a stonewall
Fillet lodged sparking under the front wheel and high he was flung,
At least three metres - five you swore - and span in the air legs over head,
Coming to a crashstop crumple on his neck,
and no-one could quite believe
The snap,
Wishing it a firecracker or burst balloon, but he didn't get up.

The council forbade the village from such sport, and there is nothing now
To mark the passage of honest, girlish seasons, southern seasons, but the dull
Tacking of notice to board, the pasting of creosote syrup to five bar fence,
The slow hum of diesel generators and the click of the tourist SLR camera
Upon the bridge below the larch where gremlins and I once were Kings.

klee - ancient sound

Life In The Wars

A glade of violence and colour,
An A-bomb of youth
Amidst the elm and flaccid larch:

Our Lugers and Colts loaded with
Kid's ammo, awaiting
The burgers sizzle on riverbank,
Innocence undefiled.

Our punctured
Soft, pulpy mounds of Mars
Blooded on the stickleback caught
With bamboo, string, paperclip and worm.

Our promised violence gallery:
A suite of silence and kilo drugs,
Plimsoll screams in corridors west
A slow roaring need for alcohol.

Directors and Managers
Saw 'em dying dressed as nurses,
Screwacking about the bend
And on in a hail of hell flung far,

Oh we gave 'em war, those
Saps wired into the torture circuit,
Oh we gave 'em war, those
Saps wired in by the nip and tic,
Till they could take no more,
Till they could take no more
And fell into careers, sedate
And cured, you know?

The team of vicars eyeing the crown
Wrapped up in the pram
With troops, where were they
When needed most?

When our stonewall
Resistance collapsed
By bureaucratic sloth gas,
When the purple choker got you
Legs over head, already
D...

And no one heard
The snap
But me.

The everpresent generators,
The click of the newsdesk SLRs,
The chalky acid epitaphs,
The foreign men in foreign cars:

I wish it all
Away from here
And dump it on America,

The vapid principality
That still ignores your viscious star.

lomo

Abjective Statement

Amidst the hollow cavity of the rhodo you sat in an earthy front garden flowerbed munching brown paper under the opened sash window. Tinkles of news and weather played out and a car drove too slowly down the street, observing the residents. Oriental despot. Perpetual - this august belief in the return to higher form, a new year, an elevated rank, a prefect complex - yes, the old hoar knot of school's relentless promotions, yes, a pedestal.
Your mind slammed closed with retractable confidence, staring at pluto's nose, the gas constellation aflame in the yellow skies, pluralising sky as a statement of intent, a bleachy exposure of possibility, a perhaps. Ratzinger right. Tarnished silver brought back with a burnish cloth - that kind of thing - redux, you know, invention.
A man of letters and an engraver of sardonic epitaphs, a sufferer of pollen plague unravelled by spores, your very still hand videoprinting home truths on the stock board above the heads of brokers, sweeps dancing in the fly festival.
An honour, a tahitian bride with chrysanthemum garlands and fat soapy tits who teaches the truth of self to others, a pearl eyed beauty - beauty in its full sense, untraceable and forgotten, a sublime corblimey of hips and hair, you knew, biblical, that is. Unpopular Duchess.
You are close now, close to an undertaking of transformation, close to the opening game of the tournament, close to letting somebody believe that the brittle spokes of your wheel revolve around a hub of decency, close to Optimus Prime and the Magnum Opus.
Crawling an underbelly graze away from England's middle aged bushes, I revere you for reading while no-one can understand it.
This - it is the best thing you have ever written because you're writing it in the NOW.

All this and more to come and in novel arrangement titled 'Adam Thomas and the Casualty of Acid', whose key triplets unlock hearts, steep minds in RGB, and, most importantly of all, pay the rent.

Highland Division

Meatless fatigue
a lip gum glue as noble poverty
condenses,

arrant his neck
in Scot's windchill,

a pattern phrenic
with rumours of rain.

Groundstone wit but
still
and cold and cold
in the wintry tiers

spectating high
in the cheap seat

stalling
the little hand
with Laphroaig
peat,
and cigarets,

rolling over
from car boot to beach head

adrift
in Umbrian water.

shrig

allotment

The terrace in bloom,
verge to embankment

with asphalt pollen,
the nebulous irritant and

billboards are charged
with static emotion

crackling the spines
of commuting man.

The postman is wheeling,
inevitably,

but on hearing
the crunch of my spade,

peers over the wall
to where the grass

seems clean, an
overflow of chlorophyll.

'Mourning rory?'
'No, I've buried her.'

'That's good news,
she was a lucifer'.

Left alone with porcelain
soil, honey

cigarets and rolling
spring cumuli,

the crunch of my spade
fills in her grave

to nourish the green
roots below.

status

Sear the escallops in brandy butter like on the cable TV,
sculpt the marble face of status like a naughty graven effigy.
Swill the port within safe harbour and spark up sweet tongue cancer,
in hope the evening will unravel without stench, bile, or rancour.

Braise the fleisch of ten ton steaks and fizz up immaculate G & T's,
paint resplendent black canvas figures in reflection of Society.
Julienne red onions from a coveted med clime fry
as guests arrive in the mock baroque hallway, a complimentary line.

*

Crystal drum and silver stick
pierce the chatter, a chime for speech:

"I betrayed you meter by meter, stinking of whiskey of cash,
on a wrought iron bench under a protected ewe tree
I made love to her for hash."

Now mutiny is in the mutter
arising from the diners:

"Flambé the cheesecake, roast the butter, stick a pinenut in my eye!
Can this be true it cannot be true it has set my stomach quite awry!
No gathering of coats or cashmere scarves, we must leave this house of sin!
Call a taxi, let's get out, and quickly down your gin!"

*

A warm lunar wax drips upon our little garden
and as we spy through sacred aspidistra
at our stock optioned, pensioned,
impotent
neighbours,
you squeeze my arm and whisper:

"They really are the end."

flag

sung anticlockwise

the door is a jar, it is still not a pipe,
yet the strength of man
wills it open. bad breath and broken aircon waltz
an analogue crackle, backing
a cheaply recorded song.
a TV play is on.

sha la la la la la.

polymers now vicious pelt down
creating a rainbow
of forbidden affect.
war spoils returned home in frags
on reinforced runways
somewhere in africa.
the slomo snick of a beard clipper
shearing comfort
in 3/4.

la la la dada la la.

mechanical ink stamp muscles
bulge in the biceps
of an ancient clerk
always on the outlook
drunk in the crow's nest
for something exact.
the rise and fall of assyria
regulated,
boring.

my my, baby ma ma ma.

crocus white smoke billows
from brickish chimney blossoms,
and i am the new pope
denuded, balconied,
exposed,
the new god,
quantum, alchemied,
alone.

powercut.

recycled air
sits heavy
and dark voices
can be heard.

lomo

A Famous Comfort

"So it is, my dear child," said Mother Carey; "and I will tell you a story, which will show you that I am perfectly right, as it is my custom to be.

"Once on a time, there were two brothers. One was called Prometheus, because he always looked before him, and boasted that he was wise beforehand. The other was called Epimetheus, because he always looked behind him, and did not boast at all; but said humbly, like the Irishman, that he had sooner prophesy after the event.

"Well, Prometheus was a very clever fellow, of course, and invented all sorts of wonderful things. But, unfortunately, when they were set to work, to work was just what they would not do: wherefore very little has come of them, and very little is left of them; and now nobody knows what they were, save a few archaeological old gentlemen who scratch in queer corners, and find little there save Ptinum Furem, Blaptem Mortisagam, Acarum Horridum, and Tineam Laciniarum.

"But Epimetheus was a very slow fellow, certainly, and went among men for a clod, and a muff, and a milksop, and a slowcoach, and a bloke, and a boodle, and so forth. And very little he did, for many years: but what he did, he never had to do over again.

"And what happened at last? There came to the two brothers the most beautiful creature that ever was seen, Pandora by name; which means, All the gifts of the Gods. But because she had a strange box in her hand, this fanciful, forecasting, suspicious, prudential, theoretical, deductive, prophesying Prometheus, who was always settling what was going to happen, would have nothing to do with pretty Pandora and her box.

"But Epimetheus took her and it, as he took everything that came; and married her for better for worse, as every man ought, whenever he has even the chance of a good wife. And they opened the box between them, of course, to see what was inside: for, else, of what possible use could it have been to them?

"And out flew all the ills which flesh is heir to; all the children of the four great bogies, Self-will, Ignorance, Fear, and Dirt—for instance:
Measles, Famines,
Monks, Quacks,
Scarlatina, Unpaid bills,
Idols, Tight stays,
Hooping-coughs, Potatoes,
Popes, Bad Wine,
Wars, Despots,
Peacemongers, Demagogues,
And, worst of all, Naughty Boys and Girls.
But one thing remained at the bottom of the box, and that was, Hope.

"So Epimetheus got a great deal of trouble, as most men do in this world: but he got the three best things in the world into the bargain—a good wife, and experience, and hope: while Prometheus had just as much trouble, and a great deal more (as you will hear), of his own making; with nothing beside, save fancies spun out of his own brain, as a spider spins her web out of her stomach.

"And Prometheus kept on looking before him so far ahead, that as he was running about with a box of lucifers (which were the only useful things he ever invented, and do as much harm as good), he trod on his own nose, and tumbled down (as most deductive philosophers do), whereby he set the Thames on fire; and they have hardly put it out again yet. So he had to be chained to the top of a mountain, with a vulture by him to give him a peck whenever he stirred, lest he should turn the whole world upside down with his prophecies and his theories.

"But stupid old Epimetheus went working and grubbing on, with the help of his wife Pandora, always looking behind him to see what had happened, till he really learnt to know now and then what would happen next; and understood so well which side his bread was buttered, and which way the cat jumped, that he began to make things which would work, and go on working, too; to till and drain the ground, and to make looms, and ships, and railroads, and steam ploughs, and electric telegraphs, and all the things which you see in the Great Exhibition; and to foretell famine, and bad weather, and the price of stocks and (what is hardest of all) the next vagary of the great idol Whirligig, which some call Public Opinion; till at last he grew as rich as a Jew, and as fat as a farmer, and people thought twice before they meddled with him, but only once before they asked him to help them; for, because he earned his money well, he could afford to spend it well likewise.

"And his children are the men of science, who get good lasting work done in the world; but the children of Prometheus are the fanatics, and the theorists, and the bigots, and the bores, and the noisy windy people, who go telling silly folk what will happen, instead of looking to see what has happened already."

why i write and what i want

where i derail the train is in the quiet tunnels, away from the city, tramping the heathery downs, rubbing mittens in the cold excitement of a find: passengers flung through windows crumpled on their chins amongst scree and sleepers, orange obese on the tracks. to derail a train in a tunnel you must use sturdy oak, pine or beech logs, or cement bags which act like ballast and have the added effect of snarling up the fluid braking system with sticky dust. i try to avoid causing a fire, for fear the smoke beacon, instead methodically black-bagging leather wallets, briefcases, bras, rings which i chop and pocket, mobile phones, i-pods, decent unstained clothing - if any. i carry an important, polished spade in the unlikely event of any zombied survivors staggering about concussed clutching the blood against the temples, legs, abdomen, faces. it would be interesting to take pictures of the victims, but i feel that anonymity is important for my own wellbeing, no point taking work home. it is a mark of experience to always listen for the high hiss rattle in the steel lines, the distant foghorns, another cataclysm in the great natural order unfolding. you with your nietzsche, your blanchot, your great lazy atheism, i am closer to bedding an idea of god than you could possibly appreciate. you, in your cities, have a convenience of tedious money, and to the quick it grips you. i am in bed with god and many dead people.

i write because i can, an amateur and with that snobbish creationism that will not challenge a canon which still places the novel at its peak. but i find a grim solace in fighting, and a masochistic pride in the slow slow progress of a year in which nothing seems closer and everything seems bigger.

i want to change, to satirise, to rebel, to revolutionise the structure of society, but laughably so, for no great people can plan such a lucky accident in history. i detest the patronising syntax of the word idealism, ever muttered snidely by the astute, mature intelligencia seated at the Caius College dinner table.

i want to inhabit a surreal, damaged universe that drifts somewhere freudian between alice and the water babies. i want to be pilloried in the press for my impossible nature, my salinger reclusivity, my forests, my deer. i want to fall in love with my villains.

i want my axe jammed into the world's neck.

i want you to enjoy it, but to go away now and have more important thoughts of your own.

notes

3 strikes

Frisk

The early moon wallows, outshone
by the golden crescent of a vapour
trail, which I find remarkable.

Left the house early
to visit anders
but by the bright sun of ten
he was stoned and shirtless in the garden
with a telescopic air rifle,
breaking its neck whooping
inserting fresh little lead scotsmen
and taking wild shots from the shoulder
at a dove on the roof.

I said that I couldn't see the dove,
and left him to it.


*


Bad News For Young Writers - Hazlitt's Back!

Why?

Mr Hazlitt, a resilient ingrain,
upsetting the balance of time passed,
here has witnessed,
amongst others:

the sufferance of epiphanies in the elevator,
compassionate minds in sudden upheaval
like ocean plates,
horrendous shifts of
perspective,
a cold damning panic,
a word used not lightly,
the taboo facets
of afflicted privet drives ,
a cold rage singular, private
terrifying,
love,
handwriting class,

and has sinceforth
proclaimed to have disabled empathy

so your wild bared teeth
ripping at the flesh of the innocent
and demanding screams

in the street
outside

not forty yards
from a window

can quite frankly
fuck off.


*


Poetic Lesson

Don't put golden syrup
in your marinade,
chefs.


*

note1

note2

note3

strategy: ill gotten

Consolation 1

gains
advances
a room of one's own
a view of a river

enough, in short,
to be defined


Consolation 2

pa pow pa pow
pa pa pa pa

pow pa pa

'I'm a celebrity...
get me out...'


A Plot FootNote

romance
that underused word
encroached upon with stories of war

PaNic
at the loss of things

necessary changes

understanding
a force
rolling in my molten gut

neglect - pressures

but as a muse
in your studio
I become
inspired
and for a time
happy


Manifesto

Courage to depict the buttterfly
without sickening
with waxy carapace crunch

Honour in consorting the image
for it is holy
the maker of heaven and earth

Sufference a great strength
like a sunlit
crucifix

Thus courage to orate the Christ:
silky blood
the body, failing.

(see consolations)

The Recording Studio

Shrig

The interest of the interest (ways of keeping this blog fresh)

and I am sorry too because there's not much left to write about round here except, it would seem, rantpoems riddled with crimes against meter and image.

Now. The best way in which to advance my subjournal 'career' is to get a loan for 5,000 quid (one hundred monkeys) to be spent on the following:

1. Phone Line Rental for calls to and from Rio de Janeiro, on thirty different numbers. I don't know how much this is.
2. Cheap Superfast Unbranded Internet Bought Computer - to act both as switchboard and as server. 500 quid.
3. A select committee of wankers to be used as researchers who must steal suitable passages of pornographic soundtracks to be recycled as a montage porn piece to be played to the customer. Cheap and fraudulent untraceable process.
4. Eyepopping advertising on the internet and in Fiesta, Escort etc.
5. Ethically? I don't mind, if I'm using sounds already recorded.
6. Ethnically? No I won't do that one.

'Money sufficient to live of the interest of the interest', quite M de Botton, and this means that 70 grand in a high interest (15-20%) account will generate 8 grand every three months. I could probably limit myself in these carefree youthful days to just 2500 a month - I lived for six months in India on two and a half grand.

*

I'll keep a blog about it, which will be vastly more interesting than this one (although, there are a few modest exceptions where I hit the straw around the target).

This is a foul smelling blog and no-one in their right mind should go near it, especially in summer.

Find The Colours

The day is grey and I walk the dog along by her
yelping throat straining on the choke chain
in this city where the tree trunks are designed
to let their fronds dip over the pavement,
peppering the pedestrian iris with sunblots
or teasing the top of the head with droplets of water.
The dog is called Cynth and I am walking it as a favour.
The day is grey and wrangling out the phobias,
and as I turn the corner with my head down dragging Cynth
I brush against a woman's arm and she drops her styrofoam
cup of soup on the pavement.
We stand regarding it for a while,
I think it must be a Winter Warmer with chili to make
such a vivid Seville butterfly stain spread across the slabs.
I notice she is breathing through her mouth.

'I'm sorry - can I buy you another one?'

She stares into me, turns and walks off with a slight huff,
wearing fur. Breath pops in clouds over her soft shoulder
like little rich steamed doubts on a plate with a fingerbowl
and a perforated slice of lemon. The dog urinates in the soup,
her white legs flecked with diced coriander,
there, amidst the battlefield, victorious.
A second dog scampers through the traffic
and starts to lick up the soup and piss,
and I am about to tell it off when I recognise it,
so I pat it on the back and grin at Cynth.

'You can't bring that in here' says the clerk of the library.

The hall is panelled with wood and cold.
There are no artificial lights.

'But she's got soup on her - someone spilt it' I add, looking criminal.
'You can't bring that thing in here' repeats the clerk.

I tie her to the railing and go in to get a book that has photos
of naked Amazon women, with commentary by two professors.
When I return I find a homeless man licking the dog's white flank
and picking out the miniature pasta penne in desperation.
I can smell him from the door and I
do not know what to do with this information.
I bang on the glass to attract the clerk's attention
and point at the gruesome appetiser
to let the Library know what to do with their old mattresses.

'Here, please.' I offer the tramp a few cigarets to digest his meal with
and untie the lead. When I get back to the office,
Jackson shouts abuse at me as I pass his cubicle.
I am sat back at the desk for three minutes,
booting up and shuffling files, when Jackson is standing there
with his quaint muscular aura, a sad little misunderstanding of
psychology in his piggy eyes. I don't look at him.
He slaps down a disciplinary writ and stalks off, loudly.
I crumple the writ and chuck it into a communal dustbin,
seriously. Not in a bookshop.
Better to be fired than live like this, flourescent.

Whilst eating a repellant duck and cranberry sandwich,
a melancholy, regrettable text message prompts me to
stare at photos of my family and think about moving on.

Blackbird

Shrig

Kiev In A Dioxin Time

I fly in over a lake where the bombs fell every day
with a glass of orange, Bombay Sapphire and ice
refracting the 35 thousand foot sunlit cabin.
The large Sikh next to me has taken my earphones,
a shaving bag, the emergency instruction pamphlet
and a shrunken cheese called ‘Vlad’,
all for his children, I hope,
the alternative being
unbearable.

Turning to rest my head against the soporific iron frame
that vibrates with fuel consumption and tannoy deliveries,

I regard the below with a growing excite:
the atlas stalag, a lucid culture basin bristling
with symphonic communist architecture and

awash with apartheid's fragrances:

stag beetle wing cases in crystal vodka chasers,
the reassurance of sprayed disinfectant,
the home comfort of foreign deodorant.

Blinking in the crimson airport’s silent paint

and bothered by doctored metal detectors,

taxi touts and the armed guard's kalashes,

I see from afar one fibrous,

mesh

pulse,

so I walk hard and scarfed in crisp Baltic coloursplash

past the great attraction of St Katerina,
with her personal daffodils

and her springy depressions,

and hear gusting hypnotic secret bible chapters
sung through the opening in her vulgar oak doors.

An elderly bride looks me down,
I see in her shimmer:

dreams to come
strained

gainst timed satin.

Leant up by a crumbled edifice a busker plays the lute
under defoliated posters
of Yuschenko's palsy collapse
condensed into propogating bloc imagery.

I drink book shop coffee in a croatian cup,

lillywhite walls exact to the livery grey
milk of Monet open outwards,

and an indulgence of liberals tell me of fascism,

and how it stamps down every day

upon the forbidden criminal voice.

These crumpled silkcloud

cafe wars taste buttersweet,

hip curving and strong,

and as evening sloshes

outside the window,

old faithful moon illustrates

the market skirts and obsidian

hurt of a girl washing in Staz hill

spring water and shades a boy

living crisp in white shirts,

voices

singing between balconies

with a criminal song
this sharp eve.

Witness?

dial

http://circletide.blogspot.com/2005/01/written-from-negative.html

free

Now Now Very Now

Charlotte Henson and Gavin Church bucking on her purple velour waterbed,
he buried to hilt in her capacious junta, her guffing out the nose like a phonesex operative from Cameroon, covert in Hackney headquarters, wastreling, grabbing his hand to her flabby udders, collapsing inwardly at the inevitable, a pair of tapped cattle.

Katie Andre and Peter Price hooving columbian gold off blind black maybe's marble ass, oblivious to dreams of need on the muted nanny intercom, eyelocked, niplip twisting, champagne bath overflowing onto gutskinned creature rugs unaware all the time of a building psychosis patterned cunningly into the wallpaper.

Tony Minister and Cherie primed for acceptance on all fours gagging paroxycal, strapped, safety words an unholy Hesbollah and Arafat, heard these words years ago when law school was chucking em out to defend the rape of a nation, must remember sanatogens and boiled eggs to reinvigorate for the Sunday Papers.

Paul Magee and that crass bint at home watching themselves on television, each mutually respecting the other.

Moharrod hanging from a sycamore tree with ess aych one tee seeping down into puddles under those nice brown brogues, sounds of rope creak back and forward, how sweet and irresistible, a childs noise, occasionally in time with the distant M1(N).

Robbie Williams bashing to Razzle, eyes all spazzy like a broken Bentley, momentarily interrupted by a trendy breed of dog scratching at the bathroom door.

Papal party a bit of a let down this year, none will know he died with tears in his eyes, trust me.

They're all smaller in real life than they appear on TV.

Lomo - When I Was In Nam

First Impressions

The close and clear sweat that surrounds
when under the perverse burn
of love's cold scrutiny

hooks my vision to the vaulted
roof of halogen halos
and levitates an intellect in form,

held. Pure inquisition
this blind date, accelerating
away into horizons

of buried embarrassment,
like a faux pas in a psychological
confession.

I cement the hideous in me
and toss your fresh corpse
into foundations for buildings new,

an architect redundant
in abstraction.

William Carlos Williams says:

All art is sensual - Listen!
Never mind, don't try to work it out!

Listen to it - let it come to you,
sit back, relax, let the thing spray in your face!

Get the feeling of it, get the tactile sense of something,
something going on.

It may be that you will then perceive, have a sensation,
that you may later find will clarify itself as you go along.

Don't attempt to understand the modern poem - listen to it,
for it should be heard.

It is very difficult sometimes to get it off the page,
but once you hear it...
then you should be able to appraise it.

All art is made to please - that's the way it approaches you.

lomo - swarm

In Defiance of The Threshers

In lanes, swirling with illuminated spores,
we rode bicycles onward in shrieks
of capgun sparks,
to play sticks on the bridge,
and dad would win,
comfortably.

In clovered fields,
shrieking murder in the dark,
stung by nettles in a dare
pinch of defiance,
pounding the butter earth
carcass of life,

we ran, ran away
from houses that burn
and fall down,
ran to the spread of the oak's
belly,

past angered threshers and farmers
whose precious stubble,
compounded by small feet,
had, as the sting of the nettle,
been defied as useless
by our dare.

Taught to distrust
that which is too honest
as having alteriors, closets,
methods,
I cannot now remember
these days without bile.

A Play In Two Exchanges

Therapist:

You stand,
charged,
with dismissal of:

multi-millenial arguments of slippery political polemics,
volumed debates from the Ancients as aggrieved immigrants on Question Time,
parental mimicry of orgasm's coyote yells,
quiet deaths of a billion and one unrequited children held in conversation upon the linen of a crisp, cold, clean morning.

Rapist:

But the little professors hung garlands of kismet upon the doors of the quiet,
while the readers shuffled down lonely street knowing the ignorant
will dance all night,

and the little professors located the tryst, deep in the heart of a Mulberry wood,
and whilst making a buck on the side as newage experts in the sway cornfields
of love,

they crept dischord among us!

Therapist:

For your execution I recommend a hanging,
a joyous last erection,
a salute to the battling critics who've seen it all before,
nodding sagely to one another as they chew on your seared ribs
and spit out the syllables of your crimes to one another
like dramatists in darkened rooms.

and nothing you can say will change them,
for you are an unrequired lover.

Rapist:

Is that Byron?
Are you Byron?

No.
You are snapping and submerging
in the murky whorls
of textbook thought
like an aggressive red headed
terrapin,

and nothing I can say will change you,
little learned professor.

Lomo

Porn Licker

The Duke of Kent

A pungent
yes!
pungent
breeze
rolls in through the glass
whilst overtaking a Mondeo,

(which, judging by headrest clearance,
is a pensioner driving his wife
out to the woods in the west
for some old fashioned anal sex)

but this is neither here
and lacking a nor,
so pay attention children
and inhale
the viscous shitfunk

of success!

The expensive school on the hill
that never catches any sun
constantly flushes caramac turds
into our soft water table,
contaminating all,

and even
with windows rolled tight,
air intake off,
even then,
those dark brown
protein
rich
shits
that feed the verdant bucolic trails,
still permeate.

They will always rise thus:

up through the moulded plastic dash,
up through the meritocracy,
up into the chambers of commerce
and the various kingdoms of heaven,

and even tall,
pissed off
me

can do nothing
to delay, block,
or
stop them
irritating the senses.


*


Extrovert Easton-Ellis

Flange
Crevice
Moist
Tweak
Maw
Scrote
Jug
Leech
Blood
Bleed
Bled
Fist
Dock
Sever
...cise
Coronary
Suffocate
Bludgeon
Smother
Fuck
Lie
Sharp
Slice
Saw
Tie
fired
ablaze
by
your
filthy
mind


*


The Duke of Dork

We're all off to read David Duchovny's blog!
I wonder what happened today?!
I hope the waitress at Starbucks didn't confuse
his macchiato for a grande latino again!
I wonder how the beach BBQ at Gillian's place was?
Don't stand too close to the weiners Dave!
More cancer in one of those grilling badboys
than in smoking 20 Marlboros!
Simultaneously!

Life's a wealthy whore,
is not it just?


*

Fit

fashionista ensnared
fascist agency girls.
straw pit hair.

reluctant
table approach
with plead glare on.

cold! the way frozen
like a mouse on a catwalk.
sad the way big girls cry.

swim swim my blues eye,
steeled,
plagiarised.

sad the boys dream,
without,

incomplete.

Aesthetic Atheism

Like sacred language,
recognition of genius arises
to trouble us.

Behind the face on television
buzz colours untraceable and influences
that skuttle in from a cold grave past.

Below the voice on radio
crack chords claimed first
by adam.

Nobody has ownership anymore,
and there is nothing left to own.

God stole it all
when our backs were turned
and it is this that we must
never forgive,
never ignore.

Transpose: Day / Cathedral

Aisle

Downstairs,
the sisters bicker
to keep love going.

Upstairs,
the dog dies on the mat in a patch of sun,
her eyes drooping.

'I am Xanthippes', says the dog.
'Stop lying', I reply.
The dog sleeps,
the sky is red,
and so it goes.


*

Disclosure Booth

There is a corner of perpetual light
where I liked to sit and play cards with mice,
and talk of accomplishments unrecognised:

that I diverted the missy delta
to shield it from Pontiac smog,
crushed the Pentagon
and scarred my palm,
that I fractured Baja
into a dustpan and brush,
spat on Cincinnati
to drown the plague of cicadas,
and fucked myself up on Liberty island
to a gentle tune by Gershwin...

...the lights went up
and I looked out into the stalls

and the horror
as I realised the theatre was empty
and I was performing alone
in a sterile baroque hall,

was somehow beautiful.

*

Altar

Net curtains for you my friends,
content as you are in your skin.
Sallow be your names, your lawns,
and your greedy next of kin.
So polished are the benzo bonnets
that outshine the will of my reflection,
that I think we might lose faith altogether,
with one acute almighty din.
Our fathers, who fart in heaven,
had devious genius at work in their creation:
their one weak god,
who adores his wars,
is buried,
freverneveramen.

*

Day Shift in Yellows

Today I saw the anonymous client over a lunch of seared scallops, corals and prawns.
We drank five-day-old chardonnay under an intemperate sun sent up from France by a friend.
Afterwards, over small coffees and rolled cigarets, the session began.
I usually begin with this client by going vulgar as she seems to enjoy submission.

‘Tell me your problems’, I said, not looking at her,
squinting directly at the sky instead.
She laughed.

‘Is this how you do things?’

She stopped laughing.

‘Well, I think that things were better before.
I think I have lost faith in myself, in my potential.
I was beaten by my father. He had hands like spades.
At night in my dreams I believe I am still happy.
When I wake, I realise it is just the dog in my bed
and I am still alone.
I worry that my job is not right for me,
that caring for people is not fulfilment,
and that I do not know the meaning of fulfilment –
or how to gauge it anyway.
I enjoy trashy novels about shopaholics who have something to prove to the boss,
and I am a natural malcontent.’

She sipped her wine through tears and smiled indirectly.

I exhaled,
looked down at my certificate, and polished my badge.

‘You need to find what it is you love, for I think you have forgotten.
And you must pursue it while you are still alive,
as if you own the day.
You must realise that while most men are weak,
we are not all sex fiends.
Boys desire trust and faith, and a lifelong companion.
Many are diverted from this course by heartbreak
but cannot escape it –
it’s biological.
So use the perspective afforded by your anatomy,
crystallize your thoughts in the mouth of another,
believe,
and all else will follow.
That’ll be two hundred pounds please, plus fifteen for the scallops.’

I inhaled.

She was regarding me as if I were gilding a lily,
and then she stood, clutching her napkin,
reached across the table and slapped me square in the face,
breaking my sunglasses and knocking over the last of the wine.

‘Now I’ll pay – that’s real therapy,’ she giggled.

‘If I sent you a cheese grater,
you’d think it the most violent book in the world,
for sadly I cannot cure your blindness.
A cheque will do nicely.’

*

Misk

Market trader: 'Decent cigarette case that.
It's a shame it's got a Jewish name on it -
be nice otherwise...oh sorry if I offended you...'
Self: 'Despite the broken nose, I'm not actually Jewish.'
Market trader: 'Oh, that's all right then.'

*

Found a pack of lucky's on the pavement.
This kind of incident corrupts my faith.
But I was happy enough to smoke em
with a winning smile,
just like in an ad.

*

Square

Willows drizzle weary
insinuations down my neck,
as if exhausted of natural shelter.

Winds whip tarpaulin this way and that with gun like cracks,
and I regard an ugly old woman with distaste
as if her malice shaped her face.

There are four unfortunate sides to this square
where people meet to talk one another into the ground
and discuss who's entertaining who,

so diverting my attention to the hoardings,
I stare blankly at the milklegs of a Dior model
and wait for all this to pass.

*

What Other People Do

naked
knee raised
gothic sprawl
smokotine
cloud chatter

naked
glorious
transparent
heroine
parisia

naked
naked
her hand
stubs out death
strokes my hair

I cannot but love her.

Outside, a frog belches in hell,
I lower lips
to her incredible pot belly
and give a kiss.

I cannot love her.

Symbiosis

In Calais there is a customs officer with half a nose.
He is hypnotized by my jacket, covered as it is in chalk dust.
The side pockets strain with paperbacks
that will not fit in the saddle bag.

Gull screams to the tang of herring.

Shadows cross the forecourt and the mistral whips my fringe.
My accomplice smokes a cigarette with cute arm movements,
feet splayed, sole bouncing
to the tune of a distant arcade game.

Iris dilation and the langour of the hungover.

Coffee steams with the acrid intensity of a stolen crop.
My passport remains unstamped - the Union has placed
an embargo upon the romance of official green inks.
I brake to the speed limit as we leave.

Industry and the billowing cumulus of a power station.

A foreign sun peeps through northern clouds.
I slide through a patch of oil - we scrape grating legs
to the side of the road and my accomplice screams anger.
Cars pass.

Paris - 127 km and a boredom of poplars.

Reebok shell suits and linen shopping bags crammed
with Camembert, Rose and cheap French fags scuttle
through the banlieus and the arrondisements
of downtown Calais.

Comfort Vaporesse on the waitresses shirt.

Neil Diamond, John Sedaka, Bobby Womack and Frankie Ylan
blare from piped speakers nailed to the white elm trees
that line the boulevard d'Eglise-Nord, and a woman from Slough
stares at the oil on my jeans with distaste.

Nothing. Bright light, maybe, no, none.

Sliproad mayhem but a warm consideration for the motocycle,
as if the French remember a youth spent on mopeds.
My accomplice shrieks in the wind, I smile
through my open face helmet and goggles.

A transient elation.

We travel to sculpt monuments of ideals,
like a marriage for love.
Repetition of such senses
will force an ultimate symbiosis.

The snores of dormitoried youth.

Dawn rudens the morning with implausible vigour
and irritates the senses like an epic poem,
a phobic noise, an outpouring of grief -
like a smile as a simile as a smile.

Croissants, Gauloises, Paris Match.

We travel to sculpt monuments of romantic ideals,
and like a marriage for love we are doomed.
But repetition of such senses will force symbiosis,
and really it is the least we can do:

for we that were once perfect are the first to be lost.

hollow hellos and goodbyes from a lifetime ago

To ACT - for fighting

*

This is the beginning, the middle and the end
of everything that I am coming to understand.

*

We are leaving and I hug my mother,
kiss my father on the cheek
and squeeze my sister's hand.

The weather is a perfect grey.
I have earned no money; no love.

My friend checks the fastenings on the bags,
as he must, for I am in charge of the horse.

The horse is steel,
with a blue carburettor,
and I kick it in the side.

It splutters -
I turn and nod to my accomplice,
and we crunch forward off the gravel
and on to the first metre of ten thousand miles of tarmac.

In France the tarmac will be black,
and in Spain it will be red.
In Rome it will shine with the slick evening rain,
and in Sofia it will be fringed with green lichens -
but I am yet to know these things.

I forget my family as soon as I round the first bend,
and with every passing mile I loosen my dilemmas
one by one,
like refuse falling from a council truck.

We are driving to a sea, a separation.

*

We pass cows who share the verdant
fields with pylons, and I think of cancer.

We wave at children who bundle
deliriously out of their school,
and I think of chance.

I am filled with that oft discussed state of zen,
that blankness that is the process of adjusting
to accept a new world.

*

I accept the sameness of things, their utilitarian function, without question.
I choose not to question because we are too close to home still.

We are still clasped in the sugary embrace
of a parliament of clever men who have suffocated liberty
and joy from our futures,
futures that have become series of simple stock options.

*

I sit back from my keyboard now, worried about format
and whether I will be blinded by always writing at night in dim light,
worried about who will call tomorrow, and what the weather will be like,

and I realise that I have not chosen to go anywhere,
but by staying in this same place
I have been chosen to go.

This is what the Americans mean by 'destiny'.

*

Will you come with me?

The Flat Road To The Netherlands

The story of two weeks - a progression through recent past and distant present.

*

Week One - in which the autist made the terrible error of falling asleep on a lilo.

A short time later I awoke to a tropical sun searing my skin, and as the tiny island called home became a progressively diminishing memory - real panic. Shark fear, and a violent struggle. I had to splash with my burnt legs, but it didn't help to know that every kick, like sonar waves of tuna spasms, echoed the code of dying meat through the Indian Ocean's teeming depths.

Dramatic cut - here I am, writing and unscarred!

*

Week Two - in which he travels to Amsterdam on a coach.

Girl: "Gosh you're so brown"

Ferry the channel and on through ruthless customs with their stockpiles of contraband cheeses and opiate mule teddy bears, through manic depressed northern France, through Belgium with its relentless poplars and expensive arcades, and on into the great plains - the hollandaise tulip prairies.

Soundtrack: solo piano arguments and separation from the city. The chemical toilet blocked and festering gurgles over my headphones.

Amsterdam is a giant Lunar Park (that infamous Parisian playground of surrealists) and the canals look like wet roads to the English.
The oldest profession in the world still has craven shocks in store
- a family man in a sharp grey suit pushes through a beaded door, straightening his tie, out onto local streets for a short walk home
- a blonde girl in a pink window display looks me in the eye and I think how I might love her
- a fat white man with jowls offers first to sell heroin, then to buy it.

At dinner there are, inexplicably, Martinis and tuxedos on show.
There is a compound present in the preparation of certain kinds of almonds that I am fiercely allergic to.

A short time later I awake half dead in a hospital bed, covered in monitoring equipment.
There is a button that administers Morphine - it has been disconnected.

I remain detached from the monitoring equipment on the journey home, incapable even of tears when my first love leaves me.

*

The lilo tan reappears every summer, the fear of almonds every meal, the face of the first love at night - all with the discomfiture of the sex show - all unreal.

*

Dramatic cut - here I am, writing and unscarred!

*

Postscript - I sat in the front row of the sex show, during which a gorilla ran out and ejaculated false semen all over me and the next three rows back.

There is always a consolation, there is always something new to live for.

The Autist 

Why I Pulled A Whitey In A Physics Practical

We shall continue with an account of an experiment undertaken at the age of fifteen.

*

Testing the resistance of copper wire involves the use of crocodile clips. They are appealing: painful when attached to the back of the neck, they could also be used to chew lumps out neighbours erasers or attached to the back of jackets for humiliation, and essentially they were more fun than clamp stands. Testing the resistance of copper wires was, and I believe still is, a staple way of establishing the meritocracy of youth. If youths can produce an accurate, succinct and unfabricated report on current, voltage and ohms, then they are well on the way to earning the right to top Yen. I am undeserving as I was not willing or able.

During the one hour lunch break before the important practical examination in the afternoon we decided to go for a quick smoke in the multi-storey car park by the pool hall. It was always peaceful and grimy; a battlefield.

'We' were three. It was discovered that by taking an open hymn book and placing one's mouth at one end of the spine with a person at the other end giving a blowback, that the smoke travelled like a creamed vein intact down the centre of the book and into the eager mouth and lungs. It did not disperse because of the V shape walls of the book, and because it mixed with large amounts of air on its stately passage it became extremely potent. We called this artful process ‘Books’ - “Let’s go and do a book”; “Anyone for a chong on this savage book?” - and so on.

I remember the appeal of the June sun as I hung over the edge of the railing with a cigarette - the sun has always been a potent pre-natal trigger to me. My friend stood next to me and we listened to a band called ‘Neurosis’ through a walkman with one headphone each. I also remember thinking variously of unseen shafts of light slanting through swamp air, of mum pregnant with me standing at the window of the hospital and looking out at the townscape sunset in the listless manner that rural people have when confined in concrete, and of the grill in the wall next to us. The grill was a foot square and every hole, perhaps a hundred, had been plugged with dog-ends - meticulously - a work of pointless compulsion.

Our trinity plunged back down the spiral stairs, through urine funk and past parking meters, and headed back to school.

*

The physics teacher had won an award for his method, and like a bespectacled demonic Stanislavsky protégé he would smile and chuckle and scream and rant to get the best out of us. There was no best to be had from me that day - I stood swaying at the apparatus, giggling at a crocodile clip and trying to insert heated copper wire into my neighbour’s ear. Then I walked across the room for no reason, walked back to the apparatus, and shut down my conscience.

*

When vision swam back and I heard the physician talking of Yen and grades, I realized once again that I was a cursed creature. I damned myself. I was taken, white and shaking, to a concerned nurse in a small office. She had a shower in there - just a desk, a bed and a shower. I thought it was bizarre, and used to fantasise about her in that shower but now the potency of all Morocco’s narcotic expertise had submerged my libido into a trough and held it there in suffocation. The little office was green, or maybe it was just me. I ‘heard’ the nurse on the phone talking to the police, telling them that the school had a serious drugs offender who required incarceration for the good of his and everybody else’s soul, and was immensely relieved when my mother came to pick me up under the belief that I had been stricken with virulent flu.

*

I failed my practical examination and was never able to restart my conscience.
I damned myself.

How I Came To Be A Naughty Teenager

We shall start at the funeral for my friend, and how still I am bewildered at the marketing potential of the name.

*

He was found prostrate at the bottom of the back stairwell in our school, eleven years old and quite dead. We were all angry that the teacher who discovered him was the much maligned French master and deputy head - Mr. Baker. Other, less qualified humans would have had more chance at resuscitation, we felt. With that grey peppered portuguese beard clamped to the dead boy's mouth there can have been very little incentive to reciprocate the kiss of life. I, like many others, did not realise there was an opera being staged by God (it was a catholic school) until four o'clock, when we were streaming screaming out of the gates towards our parents cars (it was a wealthy catholic school - naturally) - and there was an ambulance, and a solemn breeze that made my eyes water.

He was a blond boy, handsome and athletic, a gentlechild with lilac eyes and rare wit.

The funeral took place in our little local village church (The Church of England), with its spectacular steeple and mossy, Pisan tombstones. We were scared most by the site of the coffin. I stared at the hammerbeams and wondered if it would be possible to climb, unnoticed, up into the bell tower to look at the view.

I cried because I was scared of the proximity of a decaying corpse. I did not trust the vicar. I cried because the adults were scared and full of sorrow. I cried when our little dead friend's big brother tried to make us laugh with bittersweet anecdotes about capgun mischiefs and the joyous arson of an invaluable collection of souvenir matchbooks, which we burnt together in the loft, marvelling at the different colour heads and the cordite stench. I cried when I was told that after the funeral I would be returning to school to finish the rest of the afternoon - that it would be 'good' for me. I couldn't believe that.

Of course, being but a child from an unimpressive background there would be no space for his body in the graveyard, and so we filed listlessly out of the aisles to the tune of 'Wonderful World' and followed the hearse through the quaint ancient village, out through some traditional parkland sparse with crows and oaks, and on into a meadow annexed as a cemetery. The shifty vicar played benign and solemn for a while, then the coffin was lowered jerkily on purple velvet pulleys into a damp clay hole. It was utterly ridiculous - a week before the boy encased in teak would have sniggered at the words 'damp clay hole'.

His headstone was a birdbath. Occasionally, when I am feeling sufficiently happy - when the sun shines, and the cliches sing - I go and smoke cigarettes or joints down there, on the bench under the cherry tree overlooking his birdbath. Sometimes I play him songs by the Trail of Dead or Queens, or read whatever is on my mind. If I crane my head to the left I can see my Gran's grave too - but that is unimportant - she does not make for pathos.

*

This is important to me because it happened at a time when my teenage polemics were still three years off, yet it totally undermined my sense of order and faith in mortality - long before it would be fashion.

I have always needed a best friend, and this blog is an attempt to find new ones.

What do you get when you cross Dire Straits with Chris Rea?

Chris Straits

Rest In Hell 

from - Aren't You Rather Young To Be Writing Your Memoirs?

I object to the word experimental being applied to my own work. Certainly I make experiments, but the unsuccessful ones are quietly hidden away and what I choose to publish is in my terms successful: that is, it has been the best way I could find of solving particular writing problems. Where I depart from convention, it is because the convention has failed, is inadequate for what I have to say. The relevant questions are surely whether each device works or not, whether it achieves what it set out to achieve, and how less good were the alternatives.

I awoke,

lifted her slumbering comatose arm from my torso,

padded barefoot naked to the window to check the snow's drift
- the advance of Siberia encroaching upon our lust -

but there in the mail:

immaculate papyrus crossed swords;
cryptic, punitive, convoluted machinations of reason

- here transcribed:

coda//: ' These verbs cement a foundation upon discourse: accept and reject ideals simultaneously through a redefinition of core concepts. Stories come too easily: ignore such lies until there appear to be no more.

Then read, anonymously and without reference to place.
My time is without you, I am dealing now in the unsaid coda//:

Mine are fingers condemned, where the same novel, the same tunes and the same past will meter our impending youthful doom.
They will dash us upon rocks and crevices, upon opaque mountains and foothills of paper truth.
This is us all just the same as it was, the only way.'

*

'Abandon all pretence.

Burn these screen strips of worn hurt and cession your booze to a jotter.

Steal away a virgin alongside the ripened canal.

Take another, build a mountain range, a bus stop bench,
a monument to malcontent
with your calloused eyelids flat as I drift in and out of smoke like silk.
Gulp stripes and dance back to sleep.
Wake, and Write.'

*

'We courted under glitterball revolutions, electroclash rhythms gave us the idea of eating, and eat each other we did.

Portrayed to the hum of drop D we blossomed, and to the beats of this actuality
the soundtrack of mildew gasping in syncopation with urinal flush cycles -
an introduction in no way harmful
to the future.

Did you see the structure of love in the gaze of the bouncer? The relevance of form's necessity stole you.

Let me question, as it will strengthen your sweat stained neck, your oiled collarbones, and flex further within the confines of thought.

Forever adore my underwired brassiere cavities,
forever underage, forever spun like concierge distaste.

Hang these ideas upon the bar when very much alone,
for only then will you be ready to let me inside.'

*

'And so I go, wishing you Incredible Clarity
in the day's temperament.

Allow me an epilogue:

Last night I exorcised anger
whilst walking to the bassline of abstraction.

Across car-parks and playgrounds
I forgot the passing crowds,
excluded all but low freq
decibels and a photo of you -

and it all seemed to fit.

X.'

*

Our past - one of those seamless visions of a
beauty that resides within the confines of love lost.

* * *